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I am wondering whether or not there is a way to completely remove Snap from Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) without losing the ability to install Ubuntu's default browser Firefox.

When I just recently updated to the newest Ubuntu release I realized that the installer programmatically reinstalled Snap, although I had manually removed it before. Additionally the installer removed Firefox, which was installed via the repositories, and reinstalled it via snap.

As I don't want snap to be installed on my machines for various reasons, my question is: Is there a safe way to remove it, and to get the Firefox DEB back to the sources?

Is there a PPA? Could I use a source of an Ubuntu flavor additionally, which didn't remove the Firefox Deb from its sources?

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  • 7
    FYI: Mozilla (not Canonical, not Ubuntu) is driving the Firefox transition from Deb to Snap. When complete in six months, it's possible that no paid staff will maintain Firefox debs anymore. If you want Firefox debs longer than that, time to start marshalling volunteers to learn and take over that work.
    – user535733
    Oct 14, 2021 at 10:51
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    @user535733 the deb is still in the official repo, and if it remains there for 22.04 then Canonical will support it for at least another five years,
    – OrangeDog
    Oct 15, 2021 at 7:41
  • 2
    Wait... How will non-ubuntu based distros get firefox if they won't have snap? Oct 15, 2021 at 16:03
  • 2
    Are you sure, you need it as .deb package? You can get tar.gz files for running Firefox from the Mozilla Server. You can just unpack them and they even have the update mechanism that Firefox is using on Windows.
    – allo
    Oct 15, 2021 at 16:25
  • 1
    @wha7ever Debian still has deb package for Chromium, so no problem for it to have Firefox. Moreover, Mozilla still continues to provide distro-agnostic binary packages in addition to source code.
    – Ruslan
    Oct 15, 2021 at 21:04

2 Answers 2

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You can combine two measures.

Start by removing Snap package of Firefox by snap remove firefox --purge.

Then follow the steps:

  1. prevent Snap installation by purging and pinning it with negative priority:

    sudo apt-get autopurge snapd
    
    cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
    # To prevent repository packages from triggering the installation of Snap,
    # this file forbids snapd from being installed by APT.
    # For more information: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html
    
    Package: snapd
    Pin: release a=*
    Pin-Priority: -10
    EOF
    
  2. Then install Firefox from

    • official repositories as simple as

      sudo apt-get install firefox
      

      Update april 2022: This option is not anymore applicable in Ubuntu 22.04 and up. Installing the .deb package causes installation of the snap version.

    • some third-party (but trusted) repositories

      a. deb-packaged Firefox from UbuntuZilla - regular or ESR
      Add UbuntuZilla repository with its signing key by

      echo "deb http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ubuntuzilla/mozilla/apt all main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntuzilla.list > /dev/null
      sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2667CA5C
      sudo apt-get update
      sudo apt-get install firefox-mozilla-build
      

      Note: if one needs ESR version - then replace last command with sudo apt-get install firefox-esr-mozilla-build.

      Removal is possible by the following commands:

      sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntuzilla.list
      sudo apt-get autoremove --purge '*firefox*'
      sudo apt-get update
      

      b. deb packaged Firefox ESR version from Mozilla Team PPA

      To get Firefox ESR version installed from Mozilla Team PPA use commands below:

      sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
      sudo apt-get update
      sudo apt-get install firefox-esr
      

      Additional locales may be installed by using packages like firefox-esr-locale-it (example for Italian).

      To remove deb-packaged Firefox one can use commands like:

      sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
      sudo ppa-purge ppa:mozillateam/ppa
      sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
      
    • Locally extracted Firefox archive

      If one needs to download and install Firefox to the home folder, then it is possible in the following way:

      mkdir ~/Software ~/bin
      cd ~/Software
      wget -c http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/93.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-93.0.tar.bz2
      tar -xf firefox-93.0.tar.bz2
      ln -sf /home/$USER/Software/firefox/firefox ~/bin/firefox
      
      # create desktop-file with long command below
      mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications/
      cat <<EOF >  ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-user.desktop
      #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
      [Desktop Entry]
      Encoding=UTF-8
      Name=Firefox (local)
      GenericName=Browser
      Comment=Web Browser
      Exec=firefox %u
      Icon=/home/$USER/Software/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
      Terminal=false
      X-MultipleArgs=false
      StartupWMClass=Firefox
      Type=Application
      Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
      MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;x-scheme-handler/ftp;x-scheme-handler/chrome;video/webm;application/x-xpinstall;
      EOF
      
      update-menus
      

      then logout and login back.

      To remove such local installation use commands below:

      rm -rf ~/Software/firefox
      rm -v ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-user.desktop
      rm -v ~/bin/firefox
      update-menus
      

Discussion and notes:

My personal choice will be one of deb-based.
I would prefer ESR (2b) to get my Firefox behavior stable as it is needed for enterprise level application.

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  • 2
    In future (22.04 onward) we can use Linux Mint's repository to get firefox, as Ubuntu will most likely remove the apt firefox from repositories, just like chromium. Jan 12, 2022 at 14:12
  • If Mint doesn't compile it, I'd switch to flatpak. It's what snap should have been. And Firefox in Flathub is maintained by Mozilla.
    – KalEl
    Feb 28, 2022 at 9:26
  • I went for solution 2a (Firefox from PPA) and then 2b (Firefox ESR from PPA) after finding out that in jammy (22.04 LTS) the snap transition package firefox (which I don't want) always has a higher version than the regular Debian package firefox from the PPA (which I want). As a result after blocking the installation of snapd, apt will be unable to update the package firefox. apt tries to go for the most recent version, finds out that it depends on snapd and gives up. The workaround is to use firefox-esr and firefox-esr-locale-fr (for French). Apr 22, 2022 at 6:51
  • I will use 2b, as that is a PPA, and maintained by Mozilla, and I like to tell Mozilla that it is great that they make a .deb, when Ubuntu doesn't. And yeas, I am fine with snap, flatpak etc, as long as it isn't used like Ubuntu does. Those are bloat ware, compared to .deb.
    – Anders
    Apr 24, 2022 at 18:58
  • And I will lower the priority of Ubuntu Firefox package so that doesn't get installed. See ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/… or balintreczey.hu/blog/…
    – Anders
    Apr 24, 2022 at 19:02
1

You can download the latest official .deb builds for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy) here: https://launchpad.net/~phd/+archive/ubuntu/firefox/

This is a PPA repository with official Ubuntu packages released originally for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal) and updated automatically as soon as a new version is released.

Remember to backup your ~/.mozilla directory (or the snap equivalent).

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