When I announced Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak over a month ago, I also promised that we would not stop there and bring more options in the future. Now I can proudly announce that we provide two more variants of Firefox – Firefox Nightly and Firefox Nightly for Wayland.
With Nightly, you can closely follow the development of Firefox. Due to Flatpak you can easily install it and keep getting daily updates via our flatpak repo.
As a bonus, we’re also bringing a Firefox build that runs natively on Wayland. We used to provide a Copr repository, but with Flatpak it’s open to users of other distros, too. When running this version, keep in mind it’s still WIP and very experimental. Firefox seems to run just fine on Wayland at first glance, but there is still some basic functionality missing (copy-paste for example) and it’s not so stable either (it crashed the whole Wayland session for me once). But once it’s done, it will be a big improvement in security for Firefox on Linux because Wayland isolates the application on the display server level. Together with other pieces of Flatpak sandboxing, it will provide a full sandbox for the browser in the future.
When adding more Firefox variants to the repo, we first considered using branches, but you have to switch between them manually to start different variants of Firefox which we didn’t find very user friendly. In the end, we’re using one branch and multiple applications with different names in it. This way, you can install and run multiple variants in parallel.
You can find the instructions to install Firefox for Flatpak on the repository webpage. We’re also constantly improving how Firefox runs in Flatpak. If you have any Flatpak-specific problems with Firefox, please report it to our bug tracker on Github. If you hit problems that are not Flatpak-specific, please report them directly to Mozilla.
And again kudos to Jan Hořák from our team who made all this happen!
Brno hat 
Hi, since your last post, I didn’t success to install your flatpak app.. I’ve this error :
error: While pulling app/org.mozilla.FirefoxDevEdition/x86_64/master from remote org.mozilla.FirefoxRepo: Need more input
Have you an idea why ?
Hi, there is some strange bug in OSTree which happens to some users, but we can’t reproduce it. See: https://github.com/xhorak/firefox-devedition-flatpak/issues/1
The user who reported it was able to install .flatpak bundle instead. It does the same job as .flatpakref, but it already contains the app itself. Jan is going to build them and put links on the webpage. Then you can try to install them, it should work.
Hi Jiri,
thanks for the work.
The version of the Nightly Wayland is 52a where it should be 54. Do you know why ?
Because that’s the version Martin is using to work on the port. He syncs with the master from time to time, but it doesn’t really follow it closely. The Wayland version doesn’t bring regular updates of nightly builds, it’s called Nightly-Wayland because it was forked off the master. If you want to have the latest nightly builds, install the regular Firefox Nightly that is in the repo.
Is it just me, or Nightly is not updated daily?
This is what I have installed: 54.0a1 (2017-02-08) (64-bit)
That is strange. I installed the Firefox Nightly from the repo today and my version is (2017-02-16). Make sure you close other instances of Firefox before you launch it. Because if you have another instance of Firefox already running, it will just open a new window of the currently running Firefox. At least that’s how it works in GNOME.
I don’t have any instance running, starting fresh each time.
Hmm, what is even more strange its giving me 404 Not Found for https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/repo/. http://i.imgur.com/3OHLrpg.png
$ curl -I https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/repo/
HTTP/2 404
date: Thu, 16 Feb 2017 19:10:35 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
set-cookie: __cfduid=d7799e7ba4e0baf0273d8513911e1fa871487272234; expires=Fri, 16-Feb-18 19:10:34 GMT; path=/; domain=.mojefedora.cz; HttpOnly
strict-transport-security: max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains; preload
x-content-type-options: nosniff
server: cloudflare-nginx
cf-ray: 33234cebedc959fc-VIE
And no updates when trying to update:
$ sudo flatpak update
Looking for updates…
Updating: org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.20 from gnome
No updates.
Updating: org.gnome.Platform.Locale/x86_64/3.20 from gnome
No updates.
Updating: org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/x86_64/nightly from org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin
No updates.
Updating: org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly.Locale/x86_64/nightly from org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin
No updates.
https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/repo/ is also unavailable for me, but I still do get updates and just updated to nightly to 2017-02-17. What distribution do you use,what version of Flatpak?
You may try purging all the files (repo, app,…) and adding and installing it again and see if it helps.
If it persists, you can report it here: https://github.com/xhorak/firefox-devedition-flatpak/issues
So I removed /var/lib/flatpak and now I am running into ostree issue again “Need more input”.
It’s fully updated Fedora 25 from regular repos.
flatpak-0.8.2-1.fc25.x86_64
> So I removed /var/lib/flatpak and now I am running into ostree issue again “Need more input”.
> It’s fully updated Fedora 25 from regular repos.
> flatpak-0.8.2-1.fc25.x86_64
So, it worked from 3rd try:
$ sudo flatpak install org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly//nightly
Updating: org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.20 from gnome
No updates.
Updating: org.gnome.Platform.Locale/x86_64/3.20 from gnome
No updates.
Installing: org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/x86_64/nightly from org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin
2 metadata, 1 content objects fetched; 26405 KiB transferred in 57 seconds
Installing: org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly.Locale/x86_64/nightly from org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin
5 metadata, 1 content objects fetched; 6 KiB transferred in 1 seconds
Still version is the same as before! Hmm.
54.0a1 (2017-02-08) (64-bit)
Ok, there are apparantly two branches, I was using the wrong one. The other one is recent.
$ sudo flatpak install org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly
error: Multiple branches available for org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly, you must specify one of: org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly//master, org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly//nightly
$ sudo flatpak install org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly-origin org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly//master
…
Hi, it’s a awesome.
Although I tried to activate Webrender on Nightly flatpak and Firefox doesn’t start anymore.
Could you tell me where is stored Firefox profile (so that I can erase it) on that flatpak version ?
Thanks !
I got it in /home/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightlyWayland/.mozilla thanks !
Just installed Firefox Nightly for Wayland on Fedora 25 and it works like a champ! There is just a simple minor annoyance – in the top right corner I don’t have Minimize and Maximize buttons… It seams that it doesn’t respect Gnome Tweak Tool settings. But anyway, it rocks! Thank You for Your efforts and hard work! Wish You all the best!
Yes, apps on Wayland draw the decorations themselves and GNOME Tweak Tool only changes settings in the system GTK, not in the one used in the flatpak. That’s rather a request for the Flatpak developers to allow import of some system settings.
Dobry den.
I just installed the Nightly Flatpak, its working good but It seems like there is no ffmpeg support yet. I tried to build the app including the required libs but without any luck (the same already posted in the issues tracker https://github.com/xhorak/firefox-devedition-flatpak/issues/22 ).
It would be great if there is any workaround for this at least to keep experimenting and using the browser in a daily basis otherwise it will be hard to use without the proper support.
Thanks
Hi, we know about this issue. It won’t be so easy to crack. Mozilla doesn’t want to ship ffmpeg with Firefox and relies on the system one. We can’t ship it due to legal issues either. Users can install it to their systems, but Firefox running in Flatpak can’t access it. Someone will have to ship ffmpeg as an extension either of the app or the runtime. Who will that be, it’s hard to say. Maybe someone will create something like RPMFusion for Flatpaks.
Is it not possible to build ffmpeg in a way that it will not have “legal problems”? Just to include free codecs which are not encumbered by patents. Then it should have be “clean” and there should be no problems with redistributing it together with firefox flatpak or not? Please correct me if I am wrong. This post is more a question than suggestion 🙂
Are there any plans to make this a bit more official by putting it on Flathub or somewhere on mozilla.org?