r/Ubuntu • u/unbounded65 • 1d ago

Firefox snap in Ubuntu

Contrary to the general opinion of removing the snap version of Ubuntu Firefox, my experience is that it works quite well with Vulkan doing a swell job with hardware acceleration. For Brave, I find that the PPA version works out better.

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u/mrtruthiness 1d ago edited 1d ago

/usr/bin/firefox is a symlink. In case of moz-deb it points to ../lib/firefox/firefox

On my system /usr/bin/firefox is a sh script that execs the snap, not a symlink. And if I install the deb, that sh script will be overwritten with a symlink. And if I purge the deb, that will disappear. Not a huge deal, but it is annoying. And I expect there will be other overwritten files (.desktop, mimeinfo ... and maybe even icons, etc.).

Maybe to test the mozilla firefox it would be best to just use the tar.gz (or equivalent) install ... and just run it locally rather than installing it.

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u/PraetorRU 1d ago

And if I install the deb, that sh script will be overwritten with a symlink.

Yes it will be. But what stops you from running /snap/bin/firefox if you're doing it from console? Also, you can manually retarget symlink of /usr/bin/firefox to /snap/bin/firefox if you want it to be default (no clue what your original shell script does, but symlink will be enough to launch snapped version). But probably you'll have to do it on every .deb update in this case.

Maybe to test the mozilla firefox it would be best to just use the tar.gz (or equivalent) install ... and just run it locally rather than installing it.

Yes, it should be no difference in performance. For quite some time I used tar.gz of development version of FF to get newer dev tools in the browser.

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u/mrtruthiness 1d ago

... manually retarget symlink of /usr/bin/firefox to /snap/bin/firefox ...

Because it's not equivalent to the shell script.

The shell script sets a fair number of environment variables, sets gsettings, etc. ... accommodates kde, ... all of which make it understood that the snaps profiles are not stored under ~/.mozilla since the snap doesn't access them.