Flatpak permission "host folders" missing, but profile stored in host folder

[secretmango]

The flathub firefox stores its profile under ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/. This works perfectly even without any /home access.

Librewolf stores all profiles temporarily and is not able to save them permanently, as the permission is missing.

This is extremely confusing.

Solution 1

Just grant access to /home folder. This increases some attack surface though

Solution 2

Move the profile to the flatpaks ~/.var/app/ location. This works out of the box with no permissions.

Solution 3

Some mount-bind manual stuff

Solution 4

Implement a dialog on startup, to request the user to open that location through a portal and bind it to the flatpak folder. This is not easy to implement I guess.

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On Linux you can just create symlinks for folders with strange locations. Also Librewolf has the really awesome GUI settings to access that.

[lsfxz]

Have you actually observed the described behavior? (ie. LibreWolf storing all profiles temporarily and not being able to save them permanently)

I'm asking (hopefully not in a provocative sounding way – please don't get me wrong!), because I could not reproduce that behavior (and never had any report of such a behavior).

There is a well known bug (which is mostly cosmetical in nature though) though, where the profile directory is displayed incorrectly in about:profiles, for example – there, the profile's "local directory" will be reported correctly (eg. as ~/.var/app/io.gitlab.librewolf-community/cache/librewolf/49i5nj6m.default-release) while the profile's "root directory" will incorrectly be reported (eg. as ~/.librewolf/49i5nj6m.default-release), while the actual directory (and the one indeed used by LibreWolf to store profile data) follows the flatpak conventions and can, in the above example, be found at ~/.var/app/io.gitlab.librewolf-community/.librewolf/49i5nj6m.default-release. This is enabled by the --persist option in the io.gitlab.librewolf-community.json.

While we haven't found a fix for that specific bug yet, it's not high in priority to be fixed because, well, it does not really impact the functionality of LibreWolf in any relevant way.

[secretmango]

I observed this exact behavior. Yes also the display bug, but it was actually not storing the files somewhere else.

When granting access to /home/$USERNAME and creating a new profile, this profile was created in ~/.librewolf/

This seems like wanted behaviour, with the renamed Firefox folder and all.

There is only the Librewolf flathub version, so no Fedora Flatpak either.

Using Fedora Kinoite, where /home is in /var/home.

[Glesas]

I've briefly read the lsfxz comment, but I might got similar thing happened on Flatpak version of Zen-browser. in "about:support", i do see it indicates as "~/.zen/6ymsifdgfdg.Default (alpha)", and yeah, my actual profile is in "~/.var/app/io.github.zen_browser.zen/cache/zen". If not that issue, i wouldn't have idea to look inside of var. Atleast now i'm able to move my files to app image version of zen browser, thanks guys