1661935 - Snap does not support NativeMessaging

Status: ASSIGNED

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect)

Description

[eduardo.rojasr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:80.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/80.0

Steps to reproduce:

Steps to reproduce:

Use the Firefox Snap build from Ubuntu Snap Store (Ubuntu software).

Install "chrome-gnome-shell" package.

Install Firefox GNOME Shell integration.

Go to "extensions.gnome.org" and choose any extension.

Actual results:

Actual results:

An error report shows that says the native host connector cannot be detected.

There is no option to install the GNOME extension.

Expected results:

Expected results:

I should be able to install the chosen GNOME extension directly from the website and manage it afterwards.

The behavior is correct on the current RPM/DEB builds.

Comment 1

[Release mgmt bot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Olivier Tilloy]

The problem is being discussed at https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/native-messaging-support-in-strictly-confined-browser-snaps/26849.

Comment 3

[David D Lowe]

This bug is also being tracked at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1741074

Ubuntu 21.10 ships the snap version of Firefox by default, (instead of the APT version), so we can expect more users to experience this bug.

Comment 4

[Olivier Tilloy]

Flatpak counterpart: bug 1621763.

Comment 5

[Darkspirit]

S2 (Serious) Major functionality/product severely impaired and a satisfactory workaround does not exist

Comment 6

[Olivier Tilloy]

Proposal for a new NativeMessaging portal to address this issue: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/655.

Comment 8

[David D Lowe]

This bug report is getting triaged, I'm glad. I'll add that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is planning on removing Firefox from the APT repositories altogether and to only provide the snap version of Firefox, which is Ubuntu's default browser, so this bug is going to be experienced by a large fraction of the Ubuntu userbase at some point.

Comment 9

[Olivier Tilloy]

Attachment: Bug 1661935 - Integration with a new WebExtensions XDG desktop portal for native messaging on Linux

Comment 10

[William Woodruff]

Chiming in as a maintainer of an extension (ff2mpv) that uses native messaging: users have already reported challenges getting the extension to function correctly with the snap-ified Firefox distribution in the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release.

Downstream tracking: https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv/issues/80

Comment 13

[Tommy Trussell]

I'm entering a comment here because I've not seen a tracker for the snap releases having native messaging enabled.

I've been using native messaging in FireFox to integrate with KeePassXC for several weeks now, through several FireFox beta releases (currently "beta" snap channel version 105.0b5-1). It is working as expected.

The only issue I noticed so far is each FireFox Profile needs its own separate connector to the KeePassXC database. This makes sense, but might warrant some documentation, somewhere.

Comment 14

[William Woodruff]

(In reply to William Woodruff from comment #10)

Chiming in as a maintainer of an extension (ff2mpv) that uses native messaging: users have already reported challenges getting the extension to function correctly with the snap-ified Firefox distribution in the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release.

Downstream tracking: https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv/issues/80

Following up on this: I'm able to confirm that the extension I maintain works correctly on the "beta" channel of the Firefox snap.

However, to get it working, I had to run a manual flatpak command on the terminal:

flatpak permission-set webextensions ff2mpv snap.firefox yes

Is this documented somewhere? I had to dig through others' bug reports to figure out that this is what I needed, and I can imagine that a lot of other native extension users (and developers) are in a similar position.

Comment 15

[Olivier Tilloy]

As explained in the ff2mpv issue, desktop shells (such as GNOME Shell) and portal frontends (such as xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and xdg-desktop-portal-kde) should display a modal prompt the first time an extension requires this permission, and so you wouldn't need to use the flatpak command to make this choice "by hand". However minimal window managers without portal frontends (e.g. i3) are unlikely to implement that prompt, and the answer will default to "no".

Comment 16

[Olivier Tilloy]

The snap now supports native messaging through the use of the WebExtensions portal, which is available as a distro-patch in Ubuntu 22.04 and 22.10.

I am not closing this bug yet, because even though the patch has been cherry-picked in the snap, it hasn't landed in the tree yet.

Comment 17

[Alexandre LISSY :gerard-majax]

Olivier, are you still able to actively work on that ?