Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Ludovic's posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
Ludovic Courtès

Turns out there’s a “fake” (transitional?) ‘firefox’ .deb:
us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/p

/usr/bin/firefox in that package ends with: exec /snap/bin/firefox "$@".

And ‘debian/firefox.preinst’ basically runs ‘snap install firefox’. QED.
us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/p

16 November at 23:29 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
11 comments
Caleb KE0VVT 🇮🇱🏳️‍🌈🌱
Ludovic Courtès

I found this quite evil because I thought you could still choose between apt and snap. That’s not quite the case.

Anyway, that Firefox packaged who knows how has all the surveillance things turned on: completions by Google in the location bar before history completion, Google as the default search engine, “telemetry”, and of course no ad blocker or anything by default.

This has a very “Windows feel”.

16 November at 23:34 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
Ludovic Courtès

Anecdote: the (pretty) installer would crash badly at the sight of the NTFS partitions or something that were on the target disk. I partitioned it with ‘fdisk’ and then the installer was able to proceed.

I remember of a similar bug that was reported (and fixed) against the Guix System installer a while back; nice to see we’re in good company.

16 November at 23:38 | Open on toot.aquilenet.fr
Boud

@civodul

Looks like Ubuntu currently has version 1:1snap1-0ubuntu6 derived from the Debian non-esr, unstable-only version [1], and no derived version of the Debian esr version that is meant for ordinary, security-conscious users (old-old-stable, old-stable, stable, stable-sec, testing) [2]. The main Ubuntu derivative is listed in the bottom-right corner of tracker.d.o/package if it exists. So quite different lineages.

[1] tracker.debian.org/pkg/firefox

[2] tracker.debian.org/pkg/firefox

@civodul

Looks like Ubuntu currently has version 1:1snap1-0ubuntu6 derived from the Debian non-esr, unstable-only version [1], and no derived version of the Debian esr version that is meant for ordinary, security-conscious users (old-old-stable, old-stable, stable, stable-sec, testing) [2]. The main Ubuntu derivative is listed in the bottom-right corner of tracker.d.o/package if it exists. So quite different lineages.

17 November at 0:01 | Open on framapiaf.org
Janne Moren

@civodul
AFAIK, the Firefox snap is packaged by Firefox themselves. Right from the upstream source as it were.

Edit: or is that no longer the case?

17 November at 0:04 | Open on fosstodon.org
kakafarm
Philip McGrath

@civodul The non-snap option was removed in Ubuntu 22.04, at which point flavors like Kubuntu that hadn’t made the snap their default in 21.10 also had to switch. (This was one of the last straws inducing me to just switch back to Debian and stop trying to make my Ubuntu more Debian-like.) There was a fair amount of public scrutiny at the time, but I guess most anti-snap folks have found their workarounds by now: I don’t really see much ongoing discussion.

17 November at 3:05 | Open on mastodon.social
Philip McGrath

@civodul I suspect the reason for the wrapper deb package is to make the presence of some web browser visible to fill other deb packages’ dependencies.

17 November at 3:10 | Open on mastodon.social
vlkr

@civodul I wouldn't be surprised if snap in turn is actually a transitional package that is using flatpak behind the scenes. 😉

16 November at 23:35 | Open on social.tchncs.de
Caleb KE0VVT 🇮🇱🏳️‍🌈🌱

@vlkr At least Flatpak theoretically can work without the proprietary app store Flathub, and Flathub itself has the option to hide nonfree software. @civodul

16 November at 23:38 | Open on babka.social
Efraim Flashner

@kolev @vlkr @civodul
The #fedora flatpak repo has Firefox packaged for x86_64 and aarch64.

17 November at 7:37 | Open on tooot.im
Go Up