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Firefox Flatpak: Missing pieces

The list below was put together from issues linked against the main Mozilla Flatpak tracker. The responsible persons for this are @jgrulich and @jhorak.

Some disclaimers:

  • This issue tracker only tracks things relevant for Fedora and RHEL Flatpaks.
  • This issue should be only used as a tracker (we will try to do our best to keep it up to date).
  • For discussion irrelevant to tracking purposes, the respective upstream/downstream tracking issues should be used.

High impact issues

  • Native messaging
  • Impact: users won’t be able to use gnome extensions, third party password managers, etc.
  • xdg-desktop-portals: Upstream issue | Upstream MR
  • Firefox: N/A
  • Workaround: N/A
  • Notes:
    • [mclasen] We agreed in principle to merge what's in the PR, need to follow up on the state of it
  • Smart cards / HW tokens support
  • H264 Video playback out of the box
  • The Fedora 41 Flatpak Runtime can use the org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264 extension if installed
  • System wide configuration: autoconfig, policies.json, locking preference, etc.
  • Drag and drop files outside of Firefox Flatpak

Medium impact issues

  • Neighboring files portal
  • Impact: users won’t be able to load web pages that were saved with Firefox through ‘Save page as ..’ / ‘Web Page, complete’
  • xdg-desktop-portal: Issue 1 | Issue 2 | Discussion 1 | Discussion 2 | Discussion 3
  • Workaround: easing permissions: -–filesystem=home
  • Notes:
    • [mclasen] I don't think it needs a new portal, really. We can accommodate some use cases with just a few new properties on the existing portal, but there's a wide range of use cases, and a bit of a slippery slope.
  • Speech dispatcher does not work in the reader mode
  • Custom download directory points to /run/user/1000/doc/...
  • Firefox: Issue | Merge request
  • Workaround: easing permissions: -–filesystem=home
  • xdg-desktop-portal: Merge request
  • Notes:
    • Shows the /run/user/1000/doc/... in the Settings UI when "Show In Folder" the /run/user/1000/doc/.../ folder is opened, not the host location because the file is not in the documents portal, only the folder is.
  • The "Always ask you where to save files" or "Save Link As" is broken for repeated downloads
  • Selenium does not work by default
  • Impact: testing web applications in Firefox Flatpak though Selenium won’t work by default (Cockpit might be affected)
  • Firefox issue
  • There's a workaround for it by setting TMPDIR env variable which is accessible by both, the selenium and in Firefox flatpak environment, for example:
mkdir -p $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/app/org.mozilla.firefox/tmp; TMPDIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/app/org.mozilla.firefox/tmp/ python selenium_script.py
  • Improve scheme handlers handling
  • Impact: without this some schemes won’t be opened it the correct application, there won’t be 1:1 behavior between flatpak and non-flatpak version
  • Firefox issue
  • xdg-desktop-portal: Issue | Merge request
  • Workaround: Firefox issue
  • Notes:
    • the workaround in the Firefox code gives partial remedy
    • Examples of non-working uris:
      • webcal://example.com/calendar.ics
      • magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:YNCKHTQCWBTRNJIV4WNAE52SJUQCZO5C
      • vnc://someaddr.local
      • matrix:something

Low impact issues

  • Full FFmpeg access
  • Firefox issue (not relevant to Fedora though)
  • Solution: add org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full extension point to allow users to use org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full from Flathub. If not possible (due to ABI incompatibility) a similar solution would need to be prepared based on RPM Fusion content
  • Update notification
  • Email portal does not handle attachments correctly
  • Opening file downloaded to custom location opens the file in /run/user/1000/doc...
  • xdg-desktop-portal: Issue | Merge request
  • Workaround: easing permissions: -–filesystem=home
  • Microphone portal
  • PipeWire camera support
  • Impact: dynamic handling of webcams through Flatpak portal
  • Firefox: PipeWire tracker
  • MPRIS DBus Name not unique in Flatpak
  • Impact: no media playback indicator appears in the GNOME Shell notification area
  • Firefox: Issue | Merge request
  • Opening profile directory under Flatpak no longer works
  • Impact: users won't be able to open the profile directory from within Firefox
  • Firefox: Issue | Merge request
  • GLib issue
  • Workaround: easing permissions: -–filesystem=home
  • Kerberos API through gssproxy
  • Firefox issue
  • GSSAPI issue
  • Workaround: add --env=KRB5CCNAME=KCM: and --filesystem=/run/.heim_org.h5l.kcm-socket to the sandbox
  • Notes:
    • [mcatanzaro] this workaround will not suffice in general since it does not grant access to host krb5 configuration. Even if we were to bind mount all of /etc/krb5.d, we don’t know where plugins might live. So gssproxy is really required and the sandbox holes can be closed.
  • Default application dialog (VERIFICATION NEEDED)
  • Impact: Firefox won't be able to show up a dialog when it detects that it's not a default browser (if that option is set)
  • Firefox: Issue | Merge request
  • xdg-desktop-portal issue
  • Notes:
    • [jhorak] could introduce some confusion in settings, where the Make Default button does not work.
Edited by Tomáš Popela