1850736 - Firefox flatpak does not support Profiles

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1625111

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P3)

Description

[William]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. I installed Firefox from Flathub
2. I ran Firefox
3. I created a new profile for "shopping"
4. When I started Firefoz with the "shopping" profile

Actual results:

#4 ... I was told that firefox was already running (it was NOT) and that I can't access the profile.

Expected results:

• I feel that profiles should work as if Firefox is installed (within the Flatpak container).

• When I started looking, it seemed that "everything" was in a suitable location

• But access was not possible

• I attempted to use Flatseal to give more permission to Firefox, that didn't help

  • I was left to conclude that permission was not the problem it was either the directory tree overlay or something structural in Firefox about how it chooses to access profiles.

I have removed the Firefoc Flatpak from my PC. I want to have profiles. I do not eed firefox without containers.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Gtk' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Jan Horak [:jhorak]]

How do you start the firefox with the newly created profile? Do you use the firefox -P command or some other way? For the apps in flatpak you need to run:
flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox -P
or use about:profiles page.

Comment 3

[William]

Yes that's exactly what I do.

Apparently, Firefox (Flatpal) can't "see" the directory or something. It looks like the file/directory mapping under Flatpak is off in some way.

Another thing might be that I have Firefox Developer also installed on the same machine. It is looking as if one MAY only have one set of profiles. But there's no mechanism for profiles.flatpak and a parallel profiles.localhost (more or less)

Can't understand how a Flatpak version gets so lost when I wanted to use 3 or 4 profiles.

P.S.
* Is there some kind of version-agnostic operation to Export and Import FF profiles on a machine???

Thanks for your help ... W

Comment 4

[Jan Horak [:jhorak]]

The Mozilla Firefox under flatpak - ie. official from flathub - does not have access to the home directory. So it cannot read profiles which were created before by the regular binary or distribution provided packages. There are two ways to fixing it:

1. You can give access to the .mozilla (where profile lives) directory in your home temporarily by:
   flatpak run --filesystem=~/.mozilla org.mozilla.firefox -no-remote -P or permanently by
   sudo flatpak override --filesystem=~/.mozilla org.mozilla.firefox
   This can be also done by the flatseal app.
2. Or copy the ~/.mozilla into the ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/

Please note that the Firefox Developer also have separate ~/.mozilla configuration stored - dev edition is different flatpak app, so it cannot have access to the org.mozilla.firefox. If you want to share the same for both you need to use the first option from above.