Flatpak and A full up to date Firefox

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I have always been following the progress of browser development closely. It is crazily impressive work that flypig/Branson (if I missed somebody, sorry! My memory is terrible) is doing to support later versions by creating their own wrapper after gtkmozembed was dropped.

However, I decided to cheat in a different way, and it kind of worked. I just want to show it as well.

I brought Flatpak support back to my Jolla Phone, and with Flatpak, most of the nasty dependencies can be handled by it. Then I wrap the Wayland window of Gecko in a Silica UI, and here we are.

I am not sure how to release it (when it is ready; now it is still buggy). Personally, I also ported Discover (from Plasma Mobile) and use it as a local app store, but a fourth app store seems very strange.

Another reason for bringing Flatpak back is that I think, with Flatpak distribution, we will automatically have a kind of SOTA-level permission management on JP, instead of just allowing and disallowing a large list, and can benefit from the entire Linux community (except for Canonical and whatever they elevated minds decides to do).

NOTICE: The progress is indeed LLM assited.

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And this is KDE Angelfish installing directly from flathub.

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Awesome work!

I’d love to play with it.

For release I’d go with OpenRepos?

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I thought openrepos only distributes rpm? I maybe wrong.

I guess I can pack the flatpak support into a rpm, and make it the dependency of every flatpak app, but that feels strange as well.

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I think it sounds great. If people don’t like it then they don’t have to use it…

More information would be very appreciated. For example, how much, what kind of tasks, and do you understand the generated code.

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I wonder if appimage may work? I am a newbie and still waiting for my new JP26 so may be talking out my hat of SFOS doesn’t handle appimages

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It does not.
Anyhow porting Flathub is likely the most interesting perspective

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Thanks for that information about appimage and flathub. Indeed, flathub would be a useful and interesting addition.

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@aosdinva When and how can we try your work?

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It will still need quite some work before I think it can be responsibly released to the public. I guess maybe winter holiday (my day job is killing me at the moment).

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Compiler and emulation setup almost entirely, also some test cases to prevent me breaking things. Then firefox is basically a silica UI wrapped around the official firefox. I should reexamine the code about sync and autofill line by line (I heard that llm are much better in cybersecurity nowadays than human, so maybe I will use it as well when I re-examine) before releasing but it will happen when I have time…

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