1460297 - Cannot run Firefox as root

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Camaleon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Build ID: 20180503143129

Steps to reproduce:

In Debian, I run Firefox 60 from terminal logged in as "su -".


Actual results:

A message¹ displayed and Firefox does not launch.

¹Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported.  ($XAUTHORITY is /home/sm01/.Xauthority which is owned by sm01.)


Expected results:

Firefox is launched as root as usual (version 59.x allowed this).
This is because of bug #1323302 but the the question is now what's the recommended way to run Firefox as root. I need to run Firefox with admin privileges in order to perform an easy update from menu because the application is installed globally under /opt so no user can update the brower but root. Yes, I can still udpate it manually by getting the partial ".mar" files but this is a bit tedious.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

There is no recommended way to run Firefox as root, and because of our sandboxing techniques it's quite broken even if we hadn't explicitly disabled it through start-up checks. As a "bug" this is not something we're going to fix.

"Run Firefox as root" doesn't seem to be your ultimate intention though, more like "How do I manage a shared Firefox installation so it gets updates?" That sounds like a support question rather than a bug. I don't actually know that answer--I don't use a shared machine or multiple accounts so I just install locally--but you can try our support site https://support.mozilla.org/ or our forums https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/forums/ or maybe even StackOverflow once more people run into this issue.

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Actually you should still be able to --Log In-- as root and run Firefox, just not su -

Comment 3

[Camaleon]

Just for the record, these two ways do still work:

1/ Full X session login (as root) and launch Firefox from there, but this option should be discouraged.
2/ If SSH if available (up and running) "ssh -X root@localhost" also works.

Comment 4

[Emma Humphries ☕️🎸🧞‍♀️✨ (she/they) [:emceeaich] (Pacific Time) use needinfo]

With the release of Firefox 60ESR, we have new paths for supporting deployments across organizations: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Comment 5

[Camaleon]

Thnaks for the comments and ideas but not such case, here (single user on system).

Comment 7

[kazvorpal]

(In reply to Daniel Veditz [:dveditz] from comment #2)

Actually you should still be able to --Log In-- as root and run Firefox,
just not su -

Not working for me, two years later. Has something changed?

Does it determine root by seeing that it's user 0? In other words, if I replaced
bob:x:1000:1000:[...]
with
bob:x:0:0:[...]
...then I can log in as user "bob", and am root. "whoami" says "root".

Doesn't that count? Nutscrape is showing up in the bar as launching, but then not launching, no error message.