Comment by signaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by signaru | Hacker News Reader

For those who are getting their Firefox messed up, the binary from the Mozilla site works just fine and is far more respectful.

I'm using Mate 22.04 LTS. A few settings has to be done to disable updates behind your back, but at least these settings persist, unlike when I was using Snap or whatever it was I managed to install via apt (I think it still eventually reverted to Snap). There was also the issue that the Snap version disables some extensions (sure they are potentially dangerous, but that risk is for me to take).

Now, I just manually update Firefox at convenient times via the Help -> About menu.

That's also the solution I use. Especially because I have multi-rows set up in Firefox and each update breaks this.

Plus, when installing the binaries manually, you can also apply some "hidden" settings by creating a distribution/policies.json file inside the firefox installation folder. This is what mine contains:

  {
    "policies": {
      "DisableAppUpdate": true,
      "DisableFeedbackCommands": true,
      "DisableFirefoxAccounts": true,
      "DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
      "DisablePocket": true,
      "DisableSetDesktopBackground": true,
      "DisableTelemetry": true,
      "NoDefaultBookmarks": true
    }
  }

It's kinda sad how many settings you have to configure not only here in order to not be nagged constantly. It's like you are fighting against your tools.

That's why I hate Snap. In Linux, unlike Windows or Mac, I should not have to fight my tools in order to configure a system the way I want it. Yet Ubuntu makes me do it every goddamn time for anything on the desktop, between snap and their nasty "Unity" desktop.

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