Theme issue with Firefox Snap update to revision 3068

[Keith]

On 9/2/23 23:43, Little Girl wrote:
> Hey there,
> 
> I closed Firefox to allow it to update itself when I got the Snap
> notification in the bottom right. I ended up with this version:
> 
> Firefox 117.0 (64-bit)
> Mozilla Firefox Snap for Ubuntu
> canonical-002 - 1.0
> 
> Here are some photos of what I now see:
> 
> https://imgur.com/a/GQLj5mu
> 
> As you can see, my bookmarks and settings exist, but the text is
> invisible. It appears to be a theme issue. >
> I would have tried changing to a light-colored theme as a possible
> temporary work-around until the issue is fixed, but as you can see in
> the second photo, I obviously can't do that.
> 
> Also, as you can see in the first photo, I did a search for "ubuntu
> firefox snap update bookmarks invisible" just to see if anybody else
> is having the same problem. The most recent hit was from last year,
> though, so I seem to be flying solo. Anybody else having this issue?

No problem with theming here. I'm using the "System theme -auto" theme 
to follow the OS theme (Yaru). Using other firefox themes didn't present 
any issues either, though.

> 
> Last, but not least, I'm thinking of doing sudo snap revert firefox
> to get the previous last-known-working version of Firefox back from
> revision 3026. If I do that, will I have to manually update the
> Firefox Snap after that or will it update automatically? When it
> updates, if the issue hasn't yet been fixed, will I still be able to
> revert to revision 3026 or will the new fall-back be the
> currently-broken 3068 revision that's hiding my bookmarks and
> settings from me?

$ sudo snap revert --revision=3026 firefox
$ sudo snap refresh firefox --hold

will prevent snapd from auto-refreshing firefox. It also will not 
refresh with a manual "snap refresh" command. "snap refresh firefox", 
though, will override the hold. Use --unhold to remove the hold. 
Comparatively, its like "pinning" a specific version of a deb package to 
prevent its updating.

> 
> I just now did this command to up the number of revisions from the
> default of 2 to 4 in the event that the Firefox Snap team doesn't fix
> it in the next update or two:
> 
> sudo snap set system refresh.retain=4
> 
> If this goes on for a while, though, I may need to keep increasing
> that number, which seems unreasonable.

Rather increasing the number of retained revisions, I would just 
download a local copy of the one you want to have on hand.

$ snap download firefox --revision=3026
$ sudo snap install --dangerous ./firefox_3026.snap

Local snaps installed with "--dangerous", will prevent snapd from 
refreshing them if they've been published in the snap store before.

> 
> Better would be if I could protect revision 3026 from being
> destroyed at all. Is that doable? If so, if I occasionally update to
> check if the issue is fixed, will revision 3026 remain protected and
> available for me to revert to if the issue isn't fixed yet?
> 
> Better yet would be a way to revert to revision 3026, back up
> revision 3026, update from time to time to see if the issue has been
> fixed, and keep reverting back to revision 3026 each time if it
> hasn't. Is that doable?
> 

This sounds like it might be case for a parallel install of a snap. I've 
never done this myself so I'll just point you to the webpage where this 
is documented:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/parallel-installs

Of course, with a local copy on hand you simply re-install that if the 
updated version from the snap store isn't fixed.

Whatever you decide, I would highly recommend making a back up of your 
profile directory before do any of the above steps.

One thing to try before any of the above: With firefox not running, 
delete everything under ~/snap/firefox/common/.cache/ and then start 
firefox. Occasionally, I've run across a software update where a new 
version of a program had problems with stale cached data created by the 
previous program version.

-- 
Keith