Firefox. Snippets, support et alia

[Don B. Cilly]

Bit of a rant/rave post, be advised.

Now, Firefox is my default browser, but it insists it isn't.
Not only when I open the Preferences, but now in the snippets too :·/
(who writes the snippets, anyway? Some young programmer's nephew? :·)

Big deal? No. Mildly annoying? Well, yes
So I finally decide to ask support.
Now, I understand it's rather hot in California this time of the year... but...


And shouldn't they provide a deb/snap/appimage on their site anyway?

[jlittle]

My firefox has been like this for over a year. I tried hard to get to the bottom of it a couple of times, but the only advice was either to tell firefox to ignore it, don't check, or reinstall.

Fiddling with KDE's settings, or the open desktop settings such as the file associations or default applications does not affect this. The wisdom of the Internet will suggest these repeatedly, but I want to shout back *** no, that's not it! ***.

I tried to find exactly what firefox is checking, but Mozilla refuses to begin to reveal that. I suspect that there's some overworked people whose job is to shield developers from support questions like this who have no clue in a KDE or linux context but are still determined to do their job; just that's just speculation born from frustration, trying to be charitable about it.

[claydoh]

Could it be that you are running a pre-pre-pre-pre alpha Plasma setup that may have broken bits? I just used System Settings in both Neon and Kubuntu to make FF my default browser with no issue. I can't make it ask me to be the default, but that could be my mozilla configs are rather old, and I don't feel like changing my settings.

I think that this problem is not specific to Plasma, you still need to use the OS/Desktop settings to change the browser in Ubuntu, et al as well.

Maybe try the command line version of what the KDE GUI is doing, if it is not working in System Settings:

sudo update-alternatives –config x-www-browser

Worst case would be to edit file associations for html files.


I don't think that FF's built-in 'make default' has ever worked in Linux, probably because different distro 'styles' set this in different ways. My uneducated guess is that it is not worth the effort to disable, or rather hide this in Linux builds for such a small user base (~1.5-7%, depending on how you interpret some of the stats).
I wonder if the real issue is that installing a different browser seems to hijack this setting in some cases. Chrome definitely does, Falkon and Konqueror don't seem to.
Nor does Brave.

[WWDERW]

Firefox has always done this in many of the installs that I've tried over the yrs before settling on Kubuntu and Neon. I just tell it to not check and be done with it (although it does say that it isn't the default one). Since I only have the one browser on my computer it doesn't have any conflicts. I don't think it would even if I had multiple browsers on the computer, just wouldn't open up first in Firefox. I found it mildly annoying/perplexing at first, now, just don't even worry about it at all.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, the snippets seem to have stopped bugging me about it, anyway :·)
I know those are easy to turn off, but they're so bad they're actually funny.

It's true that Linux has such a small user base. But Firefox seems to be the default installed browser on most distros...
And yes, Chrome definitely hijacks the defaults. Maybe I should tell them "Look, Chrome developers are smarter than you and there's nothing you can do, nye nye...". Maybe that would work :·)

I just won't worry about it, shall I.
I still wonder why they don't provide a deb/snap/appimage on their site.
What you get is a furtarball that looks worryingly bent on overriding any settings/bookmarks/etc. you might have... ;·)