'snap'ped firefox no-longer supports remote displays

[Richard Earnshaw]

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS
Release: 22.04
Codename: jammy

Since the downgrade to using snap I've had endless problems with firefox. The most recent is that it no-longer supports running on a remote display.

$ ssh -XYK <remote-machine>
# on remote...

# Launch a local firefox, displaying on remote machine
$ firefox --no-remote
/bin/bash: /home/rearnsha/.shrc: Permission denied
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
Error: cannot open display: localhost:10.0
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
$

What should happen is that firefox starts

There are two issues here. Both, I suspect, caused by snap.

The first is that error message from bash, I have BASH_ENV set but the frobbing of the directory structure probably means the .shrc file has not been correctly copied (copying that file is not enough, it in turn sources other files from my home filesystem). I'm not able to work out exactly what's going wrong here, though because strace doesn't work properly on 'snap'ped binaries either.

The second issue is that the .Xauthority information has not been copied during the frobbing of the directory structure so the remote authentication tokens are missing.

I can hack around the issue by copying ~/.Xauthority to ~/snap/firefox/common/ but I shouldn't need to be doing this stuff.

Frankly, this all sucks and it is seriously making me consider whether I want to continue using Ubuntu.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.