non-snap version of FF under Ubuntu 22.04?

[Carsten Agger]

On 5/2/23 15:24, Carsten Agger wrote:

> Actually, I've come to *want* the snap for it's sandboxing. I only 
> want it
>> to be less tight, and/or be able to add allowed directories, if 
>> possible.
>>
>> That Firefox-ESR looks good. But for the snap version, the sandboxing 
>> of it
>> most likely is the same as for the standard snap. (They don't mention
>> anything about it, on that page).
>>
> Off-topic: I'm currently experiencing freezes in Firefox when editing 
> Wordpress posts, which is *very* annoying with unsaved changes, so I 
> will try going non-snap to see if the virtualization screws up the 
> window manager integration somehow. Security wise I also wonder if the 
> extra layer of security is really necessary. Firefox gets very 
> frequent security updates already.
>
>

Actually, on my laptop (not the desktop, which is where I experienced 
freezes in Firefox) I've had very serious performance issues with 
Firefox for some time now. Like some sites just taking forever loading.

Now, spurred by this thread, I replaced the official Firefox from the 
snap with Firefox ESR from the Mozilla PPA. Poof, problems gone! It 
performs *much* better. And even though 8GB is not a lot in this day and 
age, one should actually expect a browser to be able to perform well on 
a relatively recent laptop with 8GB RAM.

I'm not against snaps per se, and I especially value the idea of using 
virtualization to separate the dependencies of different programs. 
That's why I always use separate virtualenvs for my Python projects.

But in this case, it appears to not have been helpful regarding 
performance. Or maybe it's just Firefox ESR being faster than the 
"regular" one?


Best
Carsten