Run Firefox on ChromeOS | Hacker News Reader

Run Firefox on ChromeOS

support.mozilla.org

262 pointsnateb202288 comments

When 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

Just wondering, in what context did you have to do that work? Seems like an interesting rabbit hole to dive into.

Rabbit 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...

So much extra to get it working (like a proper laptop). Did you buy it or just for work?

Bought 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)

The 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.

On Fedora, it's touch-friendly from the get go. No tweaking required and all work sensibly (zoom, scroll, focus, text selection)

I have an HP with a touch screen and yet I'm hesitant to go linux on it. Am I being silly?

This provokes the same feeling as running Wine on Windows for me: ultimately useful but outright chaotic in nature.

they should just make an awesome FirefoxOS

FirefoxOS 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

> 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

I 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.

ps.: it was this one not a ZTE: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/01/announcing-the-firefox-os-...

FirefoxOS sort of lives on through the KaiOS fork, unfortunately many devices come locked which prevents from installing homebrew apps. I have a rooted Nokia 2720 Flip, and while the hardware is abysmal (KaiOS is targeted at emerging markets) you can get quite a bit of functionality out of it (including openstreetmap, podcast/music players, rss readers, google-authenticator-compatible TOTP etc).

They tried to make a FirefoxOs for mobile in the past. It even shipped with some phone then in true Mozilla fashion (am I being harsh ?) they dumped it and then it became a hit, rebranded as KaiOs in developping countries for unpowerful smartphones

There's /e/os now. I stand to be corrected but a lot of the privacy issues are more about the ubiquity of 'Google Play Services' rather than Android as a base OS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki//e/_(operating_system)

Not sure why this gets recommended over LineageOS. It forcefully comes with Micro G, which can't really be removed, unlike Lineage where you can just choose not to install any gapps of any kind and use the device fine.

I think shipping microG by default is a fine choice nowadays. In default setup, it doesn't connect to Google servers at all (/e/ might have different configuration though), but it enables maps and geolocation in apps (using different APIs, not Google). It is also relatively small (4 MB should not be a problem on most devices). That said, I think a no-gapps build would be nice to have, too.

(I use LineageOS as well, though. It works with microG too, but you need to get a build from here instead of the official one: https://lineage.microg.org/)

I gave /e/OS and microG a whirl when I bought my Fairphone (Murena preinstalls it on the phones they sell in the US), and it was cool how much it was able to do without the "real" gApps, but two snags ended up being showstoppers and pushed me to my usual LineageOS+gApps:

1. The Google account for my day job has various security settings that block authentication under various circumstances, including (I guess) Google services running under different signatures/IDs than expected

2. The App Lounge was really crashy for reasons I was never able to discern, and there was little rhyme or reason to certain Play Store apps being missing or uninstallable (namely: my banking app and T-Mobile's voicemail app)

Yeah, I've ran into a fair share of integrity-related problems on microG myself. Notably, apps for most banks I use work fine, but e. g. McDonalds app outright refuses to run. No discounted burgers for me I guess!

The Flame phone was hot garbage. I had one gifted to me at a Mozilla conference. I wanted to offer it to my girlfriend at the time but it was just too terrible for me to do that to her.

Its battery died three weeks later. I still have it if someone in Europe wants it for a museum or some such…

It's alive in some smart TVs too. Pretty sure at least Panasonic runs a fork.

FirefoxOS was a full OS made on web technologies, like Palm/HP/LG's WebOS. That means apps like Contacts or Dialer were JS apps. I believe the other comment about a new FirefoxOS was more about an equivalent to ChromeOS: a simple native UI shell and a browser on laptops.

As a volunteer in an association helping people that have difficulties with new technologies, an OS with just Firefox would really make everything simpler. Just like ChromeOS, you'd only get a browser (more than enough for 95% of non-professional use cases), but without the Google crap (telemetry and the Google account)

> a full OS made on web technologies

I think that's not unlike what ChromeOS is trying to be? With the APIs like WebSerial and WebUSB enabling web apps to do the same things native apps could for years now. (Of course, you can use these in the standalone Chromium, too.)

> an OS with just Firefox would really make everything simpler

It's relatively easy to build a Linux distro that boots straight into Firefox! You can try Cubic, which allows you to create a custom ISO for Debian or Ubuntu with a pretty straightforward GUI wizard. I once used it to create an ISO for an arcade machine.

[1]: https://github.com/PJ-Singh-001/Cubic

Sure, but the shell is still native.

> which allows you to create a custom ISO

That works for me, but not for most people that need automatic updates and some support (which ChromeOS or Windows provide)

Have you heard about Ubuntu-Web?

It tries to do this with Firefox instead of Chrome and uses other web technologies. https://ubuntu-web.org/

I hadn't, thanks for the recommendation! It seems to be exactly what I want, I'll test it one of these days.

Firefox OS was too ahead of its time. It made web technologies a first class citizen for mobile app development, well before mobile browsers were as capable as they are today.

Back then, Apple and Android used their million-app inventory to eliminate rival platforms....you needed an app to do anything on a phone back then. Today, nobody's installing new apps if the function can be done on the website.

BTW Chrome is also run through the same layer now, to speed up the updates. Albeit is more integrated into the OS, but it's no near the wine you are talking about.

What's the purpose of running Wine on Windows?

wine sometimes has superior compat for some XP/vista era vidya than modern windows.

90% of legacy 90s/00s 32 bit era programs won’t launch no matter what on windows, so I’ll have to give this a try.

PCem is also very good.

PCem is intended for things before the Pentium II released in 1997. PCem will go up to Pentium MMX.

I didn’t even know you can run WINE on Windows

DXVK in particular is one of the recommended ways to get Fallout 3/NV working reasonably well, too.

This : winevdm http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html

This is an interesting article to read on a Firefox browser running on ChromeOS... that has been installed since I first got the machine.

Does 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?

The 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.

Does the Play Store version not support keyboard shortcuts, even through it's running on a laptop with a full keyboard?

Yep and it's infuriating.

It 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.

My Pixelbook has been collecting dust ever since I switched to my Framework, but back when I was using it I recall Firefox working damn near perfecfly via Crostini. Only quirk was that ChromeOS obviously expects a different browser, so getting other software to reliably open links in Firefox instead of the built-in Chrome was less than foolproof, but it otherwise worked exactly as well as on an ordinary (GNU/)Linux desktop system.

That's basically my experience, except in my case my Chromebook is from Framework. ;-)

I'm running it from the Linux environment. Works like a charm.

I ran Firefox in Crostini once. I'd say it was an "eh" experince. But then I installed Linux on it. Too bad that the way I installed Linux on it is being discontinued...

I 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.

Now do Chrome on FirefoxOS.

Alternately, you can use the Android environment and Android firefox, if you want it to work like a tablet instead of a desktop computer.

Any way to get Firefox ESR without untrusted third party flatpacks? On normal firefox you can’t run your own extensions…

It'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

The Debian package of Firefox is maintained by a Mozilla employee :)

I am said maintainer. Note that's not part of my work at Mozilla, and that doesn't make the Debian package endorsed by Mozilla as the way to get Firefox on Debian.

Sorry for assuming both of these, it wasn't clear that they aren't true.

Thank you for maintaining the deb!

It's not third-party, it's a flatpak built by Mozilla and pushed by them to Flathub.

https://wiki.mobian.org/doku.php?id=firefox

I’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?”

Maybe folk who are issued a chrome book for whatever reason and like their setup on Firefox?

Either that or it’s “because we can”.

My 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...

I 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.

For 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.

I 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.

Just curious, what's your use case for the Chromebook?

Inexpensive compared with their Windows Apple counterparts.

I wonder why they specify x86.. there is an ARM/Linux version of Firefox.

Just isn't packaged as a flatpak yet?

You can use [librewolf](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 despite having it fully working and tested for years.

There are ARM versions of Firefox available, maybe chromeOS on ARM lacks something else.

Distros ship ARM builds; for some reason Mozilla do not.

At 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.

ARM is not listed in the “Available Architectures” of Firefox on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.firefox

I 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

Yeah raspbian runs firefox-esr as well.

I have a Lenovo Chromebook Duet (the first gen one) which I think runs the same processor. Though the 4GB RAM is a little bit limiting so I don't use it that often.

You can also install Firefox for Android, though it's a little weird on a laptop.

It'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.

I'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.

so you couldnt run firefox on chromeos like an usual thing?

Chromebooks are the worst type of computers... Not sure why anyone would buy them (of course the OS is the worst part)

They 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)

I 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.

I 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"

> 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/

Maintenance-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.

Eh... I would never purchase one myself but they have some good use cases. They're great for schools because kids always break devices and they're cheap to get replacement parts for. They're also quite easy to use for web browsing, which is basically all most people do these days. Another great use is for old people. Handing a Windows device to a senior is almost a guaranteed virus/malware host.

Chromebooks are not for everyone, but they have some real advantages. Generally less expensive, highly secure and easy to use. Seamlessly run Android apps and Linux apps. Great integration with your Android phone. Os stays clean over time.

I personally run fedora and do a lot of development, but if I was limited to a Chromebook I could do what I needed and not hate it.

Hardware-wise, my Pixelbook was fantastic. 3:2 screen, touch+pen, solid yet lightweight, decent enough performance.

The software was... tolerable, at best, but the support for Linux desktop and Android apps made it much more tolerable than Windows or macOS. That ChromeOS technically represents the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop" is a depressing thought, but for what it is, it ain't terrible.

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