Comment 10 for bug 1843392

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miguelquiros (mquiros) wrote :

I have been hit by this issue, in my case using firefox, but basically is the same thing. The possibility of loading a security device is fully eliminated. And there are also other functionalities that have been severely damaged by moving firefox to a snap with the inherent restrictions in accessing information in the hard disk. For example, I cannot load an html file located somewhere in the file system. When downloading something from the web, the program suggests me the obscure location /run/user/500/... (instead of, for example ~/Download) which is quite confusing (apparently there is some kind of mapping with regular user folders). Something that I have noticed, when starting from a terminal, is that the program complains about not finding libcanberra-gtk-module (it is installed in the system but apparently not present inside the snap, nothing can be done to avoid the warning but, fortunately, it does not seem to affect program performance).

I can circumvent these inconveniences by executing firefox outside the sandbox (as suggested above for chromium), the command is (I have defined an alias for avoiding keying it in full every time):
 /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
This creates the old .mozilla folder with all the information, I can export certificates, bookmarks, ... from the firefox started within the sandbox and import them in firefox started out of the sandbox.
I guess it is probably not a good idea to execute the program in such an unorthodox way but, for the moment being, this workaround seems to work for me with firefox "out-of-the-sandbox" behaving the old way.
I do not know if all these problems may be qualified as a bug or perhaps they are just the consequences of the wrong (in my opinion) decision, of moving firefox and chromium to snap which implies a lot of restrictions in the use of the information in the disk and in the way of interacting with other libraries or programs of the system.
For the moment being, for anyone being affected by any of this issues, the recommendation could be, as told above, to uninstall snap firefox and install the program from firefox website instead of from ubuntu repo.