pertaining to or abounding in birds

Migrating native Firefox to Flatpak in XFCE

I got quite bored with waiting for Devuan to update Firefox ESR to the 102 release. So set about trying to get the Flatpak from Mozilla going instead with minimal interruption.

This is what I did...

Installing Flatpak

Initially visited the Flatpak setup page and then followed up the instructions there with flatpak update and flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox

Profile

I followed the instructions here.
I checked about:profiles to find out which profile my current Firefox used.
Then I used this command flatpak override --user --filesystem=~/.mozilla org.mozilla.firefox to allow Flatpak-Firefox to access the profiles.

Closed Firefox-ESR and opened Flatpak-Firefox, about:profiles again, find which profile was being used before and set that as default and open it in a new window.

Setting as Default

I followed these instructions
xdg-settings set default-web-browser org.mozilla.firefox.desktop
followed with
xdg-settings check default-web-browser org.mozilla.firefox.desktop
to ensure it was set properly.

Allowing Videos

I had to run this command
flatpak install ffmpeg-full and then selected option 3 which was for the 21.08 version.
Videos now work!

🐧

I hope this is handy for someone out there. It worked flawlessly for me; no signing back in to sites and kept all my customisations/personalisations too.

#firefox #flatpak