Some issues with Firefox and Snap on version 24.04

Support & Help Requests
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In reality I have already brought up this issue in another topic entitled " Some issues with Firefox and Snap on version 23.x"

In that topic I had erroneously stated that the version was 23.x. In fact it was 22.4.

for the sake of correctness and to avoid confusion I have decided to create another topic.

Here is the proper sequence of events.

The initial installation provided by the BPI M5 makers was Mate version 20.4. In this release firefox works normally.

When I upgraded to 22.4, running Firefox and Snap from GUI did nothing. No errors were generated. Most other software I tried, such as the LibreOffice apps worked normally.

I have now installed version 24.4. The upgrade appeared to proceed normally. Regretfully I have the same issues as when I was running 22.4.

When I tried to run these 2 apps from the command line, both responded with the following message:

Cannot load Program
:invalid arguments

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Hi, @xuraax!

Ironically, not using snaps may be the easiest solution. If you don't need snap support in general, Firefox is available as a binary or a .deb package.

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In fact I have installed Vivaldi from a .deb package and that worked well.

When I tried to do the same with Firefox when I was still in version 22.04, Firefox still did not work for me. I believe I had read at the time that in spite of trying to install the .deb version the system still tried to install the snap version somehow.

I still would like to know why snap is doing this though.

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Ubuntu has a transitional .deb package for Firefox in repositories now. For example, in Ubuntu 22.04:

firefox/jammy 1:1snap1-0ubuntu2 amd64
  Transitional package - firefox -> firefox snap

This .deb package actually contains a script installing the Firefox snap. So, you have to overwrite this transitional .deb with a classic Firefox .deb. Use the instruction from Mozilla I posted before, section Install Firefox .deb package for Debian-based distributions.

Alternatively, you can just download and use the precompiled Firefox binary, section Install Firefox from Mozilla builds.

Your setup is quite unique: you have some custom ARM board with a custom Ubuntu image (+ upgraded twice). You may need some specialized help from snap experts to debug the issue. Snapcraft forum maybe?

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Thanks. I will have a look at the snapcraft forum.

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