Firefox Web Apps - Plasma Bigscreen

With the introduction of Web Manifest V3, ad blocking in Chromium based browsers is changing. the new limitations and API's for browser extensions means ad blockers, such as Ublock Origin are less effective than they once were. Firefox will still be using Manifest V2 for a while yet, but the fact that Firefox, on the dekstop at least, does not have support for PWA's (progressive web apps) may hinder the user experience for those off us using Plasma Bigscreen as a streaming OS. Luckily, Linux is flexible, and there's an easy way to get Firefox Web Apps.

Web Apps on Linux are not new, and while it would be time consuming, you could potentially just right your own dekstop files to open specified url's in their own windows. Thankfully, Linux Mint's Web Apps software has been ported over to the Raspberry Pi, so we can get set up with Firefox PWA's pretty quickly, and without fuss.

Firefox on Pi

Raspberry Pi OS used to ship with Chromium as it's default browser, and while the Ubuntu image for Rapsberry Pi delivered decent performance with Firefox, it did tend to struggle on Raspberry Pi OS. These issues appear to have been fixed, and you can now select Firefox or Chromium as the default browser when setting up the desktop. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has even included their own Firefox extension, called UANaughtyList, that simply changes the user agent to improve the experience on Youtube and Netflix (you ARE naughty, Youtube and Netflix!).

To install Firefox on Raspberry Pi OS with the necessary extensions, open terminal in type the following:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install firefox rpi-firefox-mods

Installation

Installation is pretty simple, but you will want the flexibility of multiple windows, so first log out of the Bigscreen session, and log in to the Plasma desktop session before starting.

To install Linux Mint's Web Apps software, we first need to install Pi-Apps. Installing Pi-Apps is simple enough and can be done with one line in the terminal:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Botspot/pi-apps/master/install | bash

Once Pi-Apps is installed, open it, and install Web Apps from the Internet category in the software list.

Setting Up Web Apps

Setting up web apps is easy. Just open the Web Apps software and click + to create a new app. Give the app a name, and enter the url. Once you have typed the url, there is a button next to the field that will scrape the url for favicons that you can use as the apps icon on the dekstop. It's success rate for finding favicons is extremely good, but not quite 100%, so you may occasionally need to download the icon and set it manually. You can choose which web browser to launch a specific application in, so if a site struggles in firefox, you can select a different browser for that particular application.

That's all there is to it. After setting up your web apps, simply log back into the Bigscreen session and enjoy your favourite shows.