Edit PDFs in Linux with Firefox 106

Did you ever receive a PDF form in Linux and wish there was an easy way to edit it with your information before returning it?

Well now you can with Firefox 106.

It is now possible to edit PDFs: including writing text, drawing, and adding signatures.

Firefox Release Notes

Firefox on Wayland

I'm using the Firefox release version from Ubuntuzilla on Debian Testing running Gnome, which uses Wayland by default now, so I wondered, does Firefox use Wayland by default? The answer is no, but it is fairly easy to enable it and it seems to work well, with a claimed significant improvement in rendering performance.

To enable Wayland mode in Firefox, edit

/usr/share/applications/firefox-mozilla-build.desktop

to

Exec=env MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox %u

(This will also work with other builds of Firefox and executable paths. See StackExchange.)

To get the performance increase in rendering, set

gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled 

to true in about:config. (Arch Wiki)

There is a bug which results in the window icon and title not displaying.

To correct this I had to change the line

StartupWMClass=Firefox

in the desktop file above to

StartupWMClass=firefox

(StartupWMClass must match the executable name exactly.)

I found the solution in this bug report, of which the previous bug is a duplicate, although more descriptive of this issue.

Update icon in Firefox Mozilla build from Ubuntuzilla

In a previous post I wrote about how to get the latest version of Firefox in Debian using Ubuntuzilla. The only disadvantage with this method I have found is that the Firefox icon is seriously out of date. There is a bug report for this at Ubuntuzilla, but as it has been open for almost eight years, the chances of seeing it fixed are slim.

A user has posted a fix there.

Go to

/usr/share/pixmaps

in a terminal and do

# ln -sfn /opt/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png firefox-mozilla-build.png

This needs to be repeated after an update apparently.

New Firefox ESR is late in Debian

Firefox 78 ESR reached its end of life on 2 November - five weeks ago - but the new version, Firefox 91 ESR has not arrived in Debian Stable (or indeed testing, which I am using now). That means that a number of issues that are fixed in 91 ESR will not be fixed in Firefox 78 ESR, leaving users exposed to vulnerabilities until 91 ESR arrives.

Although none of these vulnerabilities has been exploited to expose users to attack, being weeks overdue for security updates is not a good place to be.

If this makes you nervous, I will detail how to update to the latest version below.

The story has gone round the internet with an added does of FUD. It is an example of how one web site runs a story they read on another web site which read the story on a blog somewhere and nobody bothers to fact check it.

The story first appeared on BaronHK's Rants, a blog by... somebody. techrights.org reprinted it, and then Phoronix and The Register covered it.

The story notes the open vulnerabilities (which is true), but the blog and the re-runs all claim that Debian won't be able to push Firefox 91 ESR to Stable because Stable isn't up to date enough. This claim comes from a bug report linked to in the blog where a post on 8 November says:

Firefox-ESR 91.3 doesn't use OpenGL GLX anymore. Instead it uses EGL by default. EGL requires at least mesa version 21.x. Debian stable (bullseye) ships with mesa version 20.3.5 For the nvidia users the following bug report might be important...

Nobody at Phoronix or The Register thought to check the progress of the bug report before running the story. If they had, they would have noticed that the bug was closed on 7 December and the problem was nothing to do with the above and was in fact in Cubed (an audio component, apparently).

So, baseless FUD from a random blog gets spread around the internet.

Debian of course has to make sure that the new Firefox ESR release doesn't have bugs. If you are nervous about using Firefox 78 ESR in Debian, here is one way to get the latest version (there are other ways).

Add the Ubuntuzilla repository and key to your Debian sources, update and install either the latest ESR, or the latest Mozilla build, Firefox 95, which is what I did (I am running Testing after all). 

Note that you will have to uninstall firefox-esr first (which will automatically install the Epiphany browser). You can then install from Ubuntuzilla. If you don't, you will get this error message:

dpkg-divert: error: 'diversion of /usr/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/firefox.ubuntu by
 firefox-mozilla-build' clashes with 'diversion of /usr/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/
firefox.real by firefox-esr'
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/firefox-mozilla-build_95.
0-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 new firefox-mozilla-build package pre-installation script subprocess returned e
rror exit status 2
dpkg-divert: error: mismatch on divert-to
  when removing 'diversion of /usr/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/firefox.ubuntu by fir
efox-mozilla-build'
  found 'diversion of /usr/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/firefox.real by firefox-esr'
dpkg: error while cleaning up:
 new firefox-mozilla-build package post-removal script subprocess returned error
 exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/firefox-mozilla-build_95.0-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Installing anything from Ubuntu on Debian is normally a bad idea, as it can cause instabilities, but in this case it is fine, because the repository is just for the latest Firefox builds from Mozilla.

Update: some information from a Debian developer about the delay.

Work on this is nearing completion.

Please note that Mozilla is constantly updating to newer rustc and LLVM versions. That means that preparing a new major ESR release for Debian requires not just the packaging of the firefox-esr and thunderbird updates, but also some very complex toolchain components. Those components are usually already in unstable/testing, but for stable, oldstable, and LTS, the toolchain must be backported first.

lists.debian.org

Debian also supports additional hardware architectures and the toolchain components sometimes require specific work in order to support those additional architectures. In fact, that was the case with this current update that is underway. 

...

It is lamentable that it has taken this long, but that is not an indication of a lack of effort on the part of the people in Debian working on this.

lists.debian.org

From Piorunz at the mailing lists, here is an alternative method to update Firefox ESR, preserving the user profile until Firefox ESR is updated in Debian.

lists.debian,org

Piorunz also points out that Mesa is not the problem in a post on Phoronix:

Works perfectly fine with Debian Stable and Mesa 20.3.5, because Firefox 91 ESR detects Mesa version and adjust acelleration settings accordingly: 

Code: X11_EGL available by default

blocklisted by env: 

Blocklisted by gfxInfo

Phoronix

 

Firefox starts minimised and doesn't respond

If you have the same problem as me, try this:

1 - If you have used different instances of Firefox from the same account, in my case Firefox ESR and Firefox latest release, enter the following in the Firefox title bar and delete unused profiles. (DO NOT delete profiles that are in use, you will lose history, logins, cookies etc for that instance of Firefox). 

about:profiles.

The image below shows the page after deleting the unused profile.

 
 
2 - Close Firefox and delete xulstore.json, which you will find in a location similar to this (in Linux) 

/.mozilla/firefox/[random characters].default-[version]

The file stores Firefox's information about window positioning. Mozilla Support. It can become corrupted - Firefox will recreate it when it is started again.

As I say: this worked for me. I suspect the issue was caused because I ran a release version of Firefox from my /home directory (without possibly setting up profiles correctly, it has to be said) and this somehow corrupted Firefox's window positioning on opening.

The steps above corrected the issue on two separate Linux computers, so if you have the same issue, give it a go. Please don't delete profiles that are in use.

Deleting the xulstore.json file in a profile folder may actually be enough to fix the problem - I didn't test this, which might be a good first step to try. However, I wasn't using Firefox from my home directory any more, so deleting the profile wasn't an issue.

 

Tabs tear off into new window in Firefox - A fix!

This bug seems to have existed in Firefox for nine years. (See Bugzilla.) According to Alain Knaff on the Bugzilla thread:

What happens is that Firefox for some weird reason does not get the mouse position directly from the button-release event, but instead prefers to request it separately. Under high-load condition, this means that the mouse may have moved since button release, and Firefox wrongly interprets that as a drag.

People seem to suspect that this happens on slower computers, when Firefox is under heavy load, or when other processes are taking up resources.

I first found the thread above more than a year ago, when the only solution on offer was a Firefox plugin that no longer worked.

Having had tabs tear off three times in a day recently I searched again for a solution, and had a sense of deja vu when I found the same thread.

However, I'm happy to say that there is now a solution posted on the thread:

Type about:config into the address bar in Firefox and look for 

browser.tabs.allowTabDetach

Double click to change from true to false.

Thanks to Claude Gohier for posting that!

How to Run Firefox on Wayland in Debian Buster

Debian Buster has an option to run Gnome on Wayland (a replacement for X*). As indeed did Stretch, but in Buster, it's possibly going to be the default.

I had assumed that, if I selected Wayland, all applications would use it, but apparently not. Applications that can't use Wayland can use a compatibility layer called XWayland.

It seems Firefox has had Wayland support since version 65, but the default is still for the program to use XWayland.

Debian Buster of course has ESR 60 at the time of writing, but I have been trying out Firefox downloaded from the Mozilla website from my /home directory, and that is currently at version 67. (That's to say, downloaded from Mozilla, to my /home directory, and run from there, if the previous sentence didn't make sense.)

Thanks to a post on the Debian User Forums, I discovered I could launch Firefox on Wayland using this command:

$ MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 ~/Downloads/firefox-67.0/firefox/firefox

Of course, if you have unpacked Firefox to a different location, use that location.

Firefox runs (with some weird error messages in the terminal:

IPDL protocol Error: Received an invalid file descriptor ###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lost

But is it running on Wayland?

I found a suggestion to use Xeyes because, being based on X, Xeyes won't work on Wayland Windows. Indeed, the eyes follow the mouse cursor in the Firefox window when launched normally, but not with Wayland enabled.

*What do you mean, that doesn't explain anything? Well, if you want the full explanation of what Wayland is, it's here.

Is my computer up to it?

Firefox with a few tabs open:

CPU maxing out? 70% RAM usage?
OK let's close Firefox:

Well, that dropped off!
And open Chrome:

CPU maxed out! Ram a little lower.
And let it settle down with a few tabs open:

OK, so I need to get scientific and open Firefox and Chrome with the same tabs open, but it seems that I've found the reason why my installation of Debian Buster (Testing as of time of writing) runs slow.

Back in 2015 when I bought this laptop, many reviews complained of mouse pointer lag - in Windows. An update seemed to fix it, but today it's back to the same condition- laggy mouse,and slow to open programs.

Have web browser become heavier? Has Debian become more bloated?

To me it looks like the web browsers are the culprit.

Shrink title bar and remove border in Gnome 3.22

I mentioned in my previous post that I don't especially like the border line under the title bar in Gnome 3.22 and think it's a waste of space, and posted a screenshot of how it looks in Firefox.

If you want to shrink the title bar and remove the border underneath, create a file gtk.css in ~/.congif/gtk-3.0 and add the following text:

window.ssd headerbar.titlebar {
    min-height: 0;
}

window.ssd headerbar.titlebar button.titlebutton {
    padding-top: 0px;
    padding-bottom: 0px;
    min-height: 0;
}

window.ssd headerbar.titlebar {
  border: none;
  background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom,
  shade(@theme_bg_color, 1.05),
  shade(@theme_bg_color, 1.00));
  box-shadow: inset 0 1px shade(@theme_bg_color, 1.4);
}

Restart Gnome Shell or log out and log in and Firefox now looks like this:

The code above was collated and edited by me from various sources: stackexchange, stackexchange and reddit.

It's also possible to add a line to reduce text height: fedoraproject.org.

Iceweasel now Firefox in Debian Jessie Backports

If you have the release version of Iceweasel installed from Debian Backports, you will notice an error message when updating:

Failed to fetch http://mozilla.debian.net/dists/jessie-backports/Release Unable to find expected entry 'iceweasel-release...

This is because Iceweasel is no more and Firefox has taken its place, as I described in my previous post.

Changing the sources.list file to the entry given by the Debian Mozilla team now installs Firefox, as the above screenshot shows.

Now I just have to try to uninstall Iceweasel without uninstalling the whole of Gnome...

Update: "Debian stable will receive Firefox ESR after Iceweasel/Firefox ESR38 is end-of-lifed, in about 3 months." Glandium.

Son of Firefox returns to Debian

Over five years ago I wrote that Iceweasel was going to be renamed Firefox in Debian.

Well, now it finally seems to be happening, according to pcworld.com.

Scanning the bug report, the change might happen in June in Debian Jessie.

Firefox can block tracking cookies- but not by default

I read an article on the BBC News website about ad blocking in web browsers recently and was interested to read a claim that blocking tracking cookies in Firefox can speed up page load times by about 44%. Whatever you may think about the privacy concerns of tracking cookies, this seems to be a big hit on performance. The article doesn't mention how to activate tracking protection in Firefox (it's not enabled by default, or an easy preferences option), but the information is available on this Mozilla Support page.

This feature requires a recent version of Firefox to work- the ESR version in Debian Jessie didn't support it. I had to install the release version from the Debian Mozilla Team. As a bonus, I get to play with the new video chat feature, and preferences in a tab.

Update Flash fix security flaws!

Browsing the web today I noticed that some Flash videos were not playing, and I saw this message:

"This plugin is vulnerable and should be updated".

The option to check and update Flash in Iceweasel told me I had the latest version, but Adobe has issued a security update for Flash.

As I have mentioned before, Flash updates are not automatically downloaded in Debian- a user has to do:

# update-flashplugin-nonfree --install

Restart the browser afterwards to load the updated Flash player.

Report a broken website

Firefox used to have an option to report a broken website: it's gone. However, there is now a cross-browser alternative at webcompat.com (found via Mozilla Support.)

Firefox's new look

Firefox's new look (the Australis GUI) can now be seen in the Firefox Nightly build. Without more ado, here it is, on Debian XFCE:

A lot of negative opinion on the internet, but quite like it myself, no objections certainly, and tabs definitely look nicer.

Firefox Nightly can be unpacked to the home directory and run from there. However, it's probably a good idea to use a separate profile, to avoid the risk of making changes to an existing profile that are not compatible with the existing version of Firefox (or Iceweasel, in my case).

Debian Bits And Snips explains how to do this. I ran into a problem in that when I'd closed Firefox Nightly and launched Iceweasel again, it was using the new profile. I had to use Profile Manager again to switch Iceweasel back to the default profile, but after that I used the launch command given and Firefox Nightly used its own profile and left Iceweasel using the default profile.

/home/username/firefox/firefox -P "new profile" -no-remote

no-remote means Firefox uses the new profile independently of the profile set for Iceweasel and without changing the profile set for Iceweasel- indeed it can run at the same time as Iceweasel with this command.

Profile manager can be launched with the following terminal command in Linux, if Iceweasel is using the wrong profile:

firefox --ProfileManager

Firefox UI update to arrive in October

Back in February 2012 I wrote about a planned update to the Firefox user interface. Well it looks like it's finally going to arrive at the end of the year (probably October) in Firefox 25.

Tech Crunch has the details and the Linux version looks like this.

MozillaWiki

Firefox, IE and Chrome hacked at Pwn2Own, Firefox issues secuirty update

eSecurity Planet has the story. Iceweasel in Debian Experimental is still at 19.0-1 a the time of writing, but the update will no doubt be made soon. The vulnerability is critical:

Vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.

Remove the Firefox title bar

Gnome 3 applications will eventually lose the title bar in full screen mode. Firefox is working on the change, but until then, free up valuable screen real estate with the HTitle Firefox extension.

Firefox current release on Debian Wheezy.

As described in my previous post, Iceweasel in Debian Testing is tracking the Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release. As I'm interested in the "latest features, performance enhancements and technologies" in my browsing experience, and not in long term support, I decided to try the release versions of Firefox and Thunderbird on my Debian Testing installation.

Installing Firefox and Thunderbird only involves downloading the latest version, unpacking the folder and running the program. There is a question about where to put the folder: some recommend /opt, others /home: I'm going with the DeviceGuru guide which has served me well and uses usr/lib. Using /opt or usr/lib will necessitate running the programs as root in order to update, whereas updates to /home should be automatic, although there is the hypothetical risk of malware being able to infect program files in /home. (Create a simlink as described in the guide so Firefox can use existing browser plug-ins.)

To create menu items, create .desktop files in /usr/share/applications/ as described on the Debian forum, changing file locations if necessary. For example, here are my modified Firefox and Thunderbird .desktop files which conforms with the guide linked to above:

[Desktop Entry] 

Encoding=UTF-8 

Name=Mozilla Firefox 

Comment=Browse the World Wide Web 

Type=Application 

Terminal=false 

Exec=/usr/bin/firefox %U 

Icon=/usr/lib/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png StartupNotify=true Categories=Network;WebBrowser;

[Desktop Entry] 

Name=Thunderbird Mail 

GenericName=Mail Client Comment=Manage your email and contacts Exec=thunderbird %u 

Icon=/usr/lib/thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/default256.png Terminal=false 

Type=Application Categories=Application;Network;Email; StartupNotify=true MimeType=text/calendar;text/x-vcard;text/directory;application/mbox;message/rfc822;x-scheme-handler/mailto;

An alternative method is to use Applications>System Tools>Main Menu (also known as Alacarte). A difference with this method is that .desktop files are created in ~/.local/share/applications, and are assigned a name by that program.

To see Firefox and Thunderbird as options in System Settings>System Info>Default Applications, it's necessary to edit /.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list as described in this bug report. Here's what my edited file looks like:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop
audio/x-vorbis+ogg=audacious2.desktop
application/msword=libreoffice-writer.desktop
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text=libreoffice-writer.desktop
x-scheme-handler/mailto=thunderbird.desktop

[Added Associations]
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop;
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop;
audio/x-vorbis+ogg=audacious2.desktop;
inode/directory=audacious.desktop;audacious2.desktop;
application/msword=libreoffice-writer.desktop;
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text=libreoffice-writer.desktop;
x-scheme-handler/mailto=thunderbird.desktop;

If you have used Alacarte to create menu entries, substitute the .desktop file names created by that program: for example, you may see alacarte.desktop instead of firefox.desktop.

The only problem using Firefox and Thunderbird under Gnome 3 in Debian Testing is that they do not integrate into Gnome 3's messaging system. This is a bit of a disappointment compared to Fedora where Firefox and Thunderbird do integrate nicely. I'll have to investigate how this is done and see if it is possible in Debian.

Iceweasel tracking Firefox Extended Support Release

A post on the Debian forum alerted me to the fact that Debian is tracking the Firefox Extended Support Release: my Debian Testing installation comes with Iceweasel 10.0.3esr-3. I blogged about the ESR release here. It provides security updates for longer, but feature updates less often than the normal release: Iceweasel 10 ESR has the security updates of Firefox 12, but without the new features.
Debian packages are ultimately progressing towards the Stable release, with long term support, so it obviously makes sense for Debian to track the ESR release, but ironically it means that my Testing installation uses Iceweasel 10 while my Stable installation uses Iceweasel 12 from the Debian Mozilla team.
Currently there are no obvious feature differences between Iceweasel 10 and Firefox 12, but Firefox could reach version 18 before Iceweasel sees a feature release.

(Graphic from Mozilla Firefox ESR Overview.)