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Run Firefox on ChromeOS
- wpnx 3y agoI’m curious if there is a user segment truly interested in this feature/product and what their use case is. Naively this feels like a situation of “why on earth would you do this?”
- nemo8551 3y agoMaybe folk who are issued a chrome book for whatever reason and like their setup on Firefox? Either that or it’s “because we can”.
- mdwalters 3y agoMy school issued me a Chromebook, but they forgot to enroll it. The enrollment account was there, which I managed to get into, and reset the Chromebook from there. Sadly, I broke it, and overlooked recovery mode. By the time it gets back to me, it would be enrolled already. :( I wonder what are the chances of this happening to someone...
- ritchiey 3y agoI can see it being useful in a corporate setting to limit which sites you can visit with Chrome to just your secure admin panels and internal apps. Then use Firefox to go to dangerous places like… the Internet. That way if one of your users clicks a link in a phishing email Chrome simply won’t open it.
- rossy 3y agoFor what it's worth, I think I am. I got a gift voucher from work a little while back, combined it with a few other gift vouchers I had lying around and bought a convertible ChromeOS tablet. It seemed like a good choice, since I didn't have a tablet form-factor device at the time, it was a lightweight ARM thing that could natively run Android apps and Linux apps, and it ran a mostly-OSS stack including open source graphics drivers. I found it way more appealing than the equivalent devices running Android or Windows. As soon as I got it home, I realized that all my passwords and bookmarks were in my Firefox account, and I remembered that I don't really like the idea of using Chromium-based browsers on the web for philosophical reasons. I tried to install Firefox, but the Linux version didn't work too well in tablet mode, so I had to suck it up and use Chrome. Kind of dumb on my part, I know, but I still like the device, and I'd like it even more if Firefox worked better on it.
- seabrookmx 3y agoI wonder why they specify x86.. there is an ARM/Linux version of Firefox. Just isn't packaged as a flatpak yet?
- ZiiS 3y agoYou can use [librewolf](https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.librewolf-community https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.librewolf-community). The is some really odd hold up on all official Arm builds https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677963 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677963 despite having it fully working and tested for years.
- Jnr 3y agoThere are ARM versions of Firefox available, maybe chromeOS on ARM lacks something else.
- ZiiS 3y agoDistros ship ARM builds; for some reason Mozilla do not.
- public_defender 3y agoAt least five years ago, it was possible to just apt install firefox on arm. It was a little iffy to get any version other than LTS, though.
- NN708 3y agoARM is not listed in the “Available Architectures” of Firefox on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.firefox https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.firefox
- vlark 3y agoI have a cheap Lenovo Chromebook Flex 3 with a MediaTek MT8183 processor that I picked up for under $79 at a BestBuy Black Friday sale. I run Firefox ESR on it with no problems in the Linux container, no flatpak needed. Here's all you need: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa sudo apt-update sudo apt install firefox-esr
- jwrallie 3y agoThis provokes the same feeling as running Wine on Windows for me: ultimately useful but outright chaotic in nature.
- stOneskull 3y agothey should just make an awesome FirefoxOS
- oasis4005 3y agoFirefoxOS was too ahead of its time. Robust in idea, lacking in proper marketing and objective understanding. Now we've got direct USB to browser capabilities and no web first OS. Backwards but true. For those not aware: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
- nologic01 3y ago> FirefoxOS was too ahead of its time I think it was just-in-time but competing against incredible odds. It was perfectly usable as a first step (I had a cheap ZTE phone [1]) but it came out as the craze for ever more powerful mobiles for taking selfies and sliding down media on social media was reaching feverish levels. I think of the intervening decade as a lost decade. Imagine if the project did not fold and had iterated this entire time... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open
- pyr0hu 3y agoI won a dev phone on a competition near my uni (the competition was who will be the fastest to create a simple app for FFOS and I just created a simple html page with a hello world in <p> tags lol), some ZTE one I think. Developed a few games just for myself, it was a fun tech tbh, but the phone was pretty unstable so after a time it just collected dust on my shelf and I sold it to someone.
- 3y ago
- cbsmith 3y agoThis is an interesting article to read on a Firefox browser running on ChromeOS... that has been installed since I first got the machine.
- cj 3y agoDoes it work well? I'm reading this on ChromeOS too, but on Chrome. I've tried using Firefox a couple years ago on this machine, but it was the mobile variant from the Android play store which felt a lot like running a mobile app on a large laptop screen, which made everything feel a bit awkward. Maybe it has gotten better since then?
- Scion9066 3y agoThe Play Store version is definitely just running the mobile app version on a large laptop screen. This version is just using the ability to run Linux apps to run the normal desktop version of Firefox directly (albeit in a VM like all the Linux/Android apps on ChromeOS). I'm not sure if hardware acceleration is enabled for the Linux VM for video/graphics things yet though so I'm not sure about how well it performs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sp332 3y agoDoes the Play Store version not support keyboard shortcuts, even through it's running on a laptop with a full keyboard?
- ryanpandya 3y agoYep and it's infuriating.
- rchaud 3y agoIt does. CTRL+T, CTRL+Shift+T, CTRL+L all work. FF mobile doesn't have Dev tools, but Kiwi, a Chromium fork browser, does, so CTRL+Shift+I will bring it up.
- davidgerard 3y agoYou can also install Firefox for Android, though it's a little weird on a laptop.
- sverhagen 3y agoIt's already weird and clunky on a phone. I do it nonetheless, but I'm experiencing weirdness with pwa's, and of course many apps (sometimes the OS itself) defaults to Chrome for breaking out to web-pages.
- Caligatio 3y agoI'm a huge Firefox fan (both on PC and Android) and I think Firefox for Android on ChromeOS is terrible, practically unusable. I know my Chromebook is cheap but Firefox runs ultra slow. It also randomly flickers to a black screen and crashes occasionally. I don't know if it's just me or this is just how it runs.
- Gabrys1 3y agoWhen I got my Chromebook in December 2020 or '21, I installed Firefox inside the Linux container (not via flatpak), and run fast.com for lolz, only to realize I got better speeds in it than in the native Chrome. What killed it for me was lack of proper touchscreen support. Then I learned how to use Linux chroot on the Chromebook (skipping the container layer) and some sort of Wayland proxy and my life was much better. Then I figured how to almost run Docker natively on it (it 95% worked, but I needed a custom modified runc and some of the isolation features disabled). Then I changed jobs. Was fun though
- heap_perms 3y agoJust wondering, in what context did you have to do that work? Seems like an interesting rabbit hole to dive into.
- Gabrys1 3y agoRabbit hole indeed. That wasn't related to my job at the time, lol. The job change came with a company-provided computer and that put an end to the tinkering. BTW, I found my hacks to make runc run on Chromebook: https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/compare/main...gabrys:runc-chromeos:chromeos https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/compare/main...gabrys...
- k4rli 3y agoSo much extra to get it working (like a proper laptop). Did you buy it or just for work?
- Gabrys1 3y agoBought it. Still love the form factor of this thing and I use it (with Fedora) as my private device (mostly running Firefox, some terminal, calculator, etc)
- juujian 3y agoThe sad thing is that Firefox actually does have proper support for touch screen but you have to manually enable it. The Flags are hidden no away and not available in the settings. I got a laptop/tablet hybrid to run Linux on, and it was definitely a frustrating experience.
- HeckFeck 3y agoNow do Chrome on FirefoxOS.
- jdjdjdhhd 3y agoChromebooks are the worst type of computers... Not sure why anyone would buy them (of course the OS is the worst part)
- NoboruWataya 3y agoThey can be very cheap for the specs you get. Some people might also prefer the more locked-down nature of the OS for security or UX reasons. (They're certainly not my cup of tea though)
- leonheld 3y agoI can understand the appeal. I have a 2018 MacBook air for that exact reason. Although it's slightly more useful becase having a proper terminal that can run Docker and stuff has saved my ass more than once. I'd be down to replace it with a Chromebook if the model looks and feels as good as the air.
- Gabrys1 3y agoI like the form factor. Small but not too small, ok keyboard, good hardware: i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, converts to tablet. I run Fedora Linux after removing ChromeOS (the only thing I'm missing is running Android apps). Bought used for cheap (they were never officially distributed in Poland to my knowledge). Taking about Google Pixelbook "eve"
- mdwalters 3y ago> I run Fedora Linux after removing ChromeOS Same here. Sometimes, it crashes on a measly 4 GB of RAM. > (the only thing I'm missing is running Android apps) I would recommend using Waydroid[1]. It runs fairly well in my use case, and runs LineageOS on top of it with the full LineageOS GUI. [1]: https://waydro.id/ https://waydro.id/
- xd1936 3y agoMaintenance-free, auto-updating, single-purpose computer? For many people, it's everything they need a computer to do, with more convenience and less fiddling around with stuff they don't understand.
- lewantmontreal 3y agoAny way to get Firefox ESR without untrusted third party flatpacks? On normal firefox you can’t run your own extensions…
- Gabrys1 3y agoIt's actually easier than what the document shows you: Once you get to the Debian shell do apt-get install firefox-esr instead of installing the flatpack. I assume they don't tell you that, because then you end up with the Debian build of Firefox instead of the Mozilla's
- icar 3y agoIt's not third-party, it's a flatpak built by Mozilla and pushed by them to Flathub.
- fsflover 3y agohttps://wiki.mobian.org/doku.php?id=firefox https://wiki.mobian.org/doku.php?id=firefox
- uwagar 3y agoso you couldnt run firefox on chromeos like an usual thing?
- trelane 3y agoAlternately, you can use the Android environment and Android firefox, if you want it to work like a tablet instead of a desktop computer.
- javier_e06 3y agoI have a quest to ween from the chrome browser but owning a chromebook makes it hard. I have a samsung chromebook plus and firefox detects it as a phone so the interface layout is wrong. I hear good reviews for the steam deck. Steam should go ahead and bring the Steam Book with Firefox support. I would take a look at that. I won't mind that the only think I could play is sudoku but it has to be touch screen with a stylus.
- juujian 3y agoJust curious, what's your use case for the Chromebook?
- javier_e06 3y agoInexpensive compared with their Windows Apple counterparts.
- rchaud 3y agoI just ran the FF Android app on ChromeOS when I had one. I've installed other apps like Obsidian through the Linux container, but it's annoying to use as launching the app kicks off a Linux container load sequence which is pretty lengthy.