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I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my home desktop and went to upgrade my copy of Firefox to the new Quantum version. My computer is set up with two internal hard drives; and SSD for the OS and a 1tb WD hard drive for storage. The 'old' version of Firefox could see or navigate to the internal storage drive... the Quantum version can't see/find that drive OR any external drives attached to my computer. Google Chrome has no issues with the internal drive, and I don't think the drive is at fault since Chrome can find and save to it, and the old version of Firefox (now re-installed) can find and save to the internal drive... so what's going on with Firefox Quantum?

Mount at system startup is checked
Show in use interface is checked
Require additional authorization is NOT checked
NO Display Name
NO Icon Name
NO Symbolic Icon Name
unamed field has these properties: nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show
Mount Point = /mnt/Storage_Disc_01
Identify As = /dev/disk/by-label/Storage_Disc_01
Fiesystem Type = auto

What am I doing wrong, or can Firefox Quantum only see the drive it's installed on?

David Foerster
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Jack Simmons
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    How did you installed it - as Snap or as deb-package? Please add the following output to the question: which firefox, apt-cache policy firefox, snap list | grep firefox. (I mean "problematic" new Quantum version). – N0rbert Jun 14 '18 at 15:45
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    I installed it as Snap – Jack Simmons Jun 14 '18 at 15:47

1 Answers1

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As you installed Firefox as Snap it is expected behaviour.

By default it has access only to the home folder. See this question and answer for details. And it will produce permission error on access to /media/$USER/drive/ folder:

Snap permission denied while saving page from Firefox

You should manually connect :removable-media plug to Firefox to remove this error

snap connect firefox:removable-media

and you will get the following connectors list:

$ snap interfaces  | grep -v ".*-$"
Slot                       Plug
:avahi-observe             firefox
:browser-support           firefox:browser-sandbox
:camera                    firefox
:core-support              core:core-support-plug
:cups-control              firefox
:desktop                   firefox
:desktop-legacy            firefox
:gsettings                 firefox
:home                      firefox
:network                   firefox
:opengl                    firefox
:pulseaudio                firefox
:removable-media           firefox # <- it should see drives in /media/
:screen-inhibit-control    firefox
:unity7                    firefox
:upower-observe            firefox
:x11                       firefox
-                          firefox:network-observe

If it does not work or you do not want to make such connection - remove Snap version with

snap remove firefox

and install deb-version instead (you will get 60.0.2):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox
David Foerster
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N0rbert
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  • Is this true of ALL Snap versions of software?! The hard drive isn't really even removeable... it's installed inside the case! – Jack Simmons Jun 14 '18 at 16:00
  • I do not know about ALL Snap software, but I know that it is hard to find Snaps with :removable-media plug. VLC and Firefox seems to be good Snaps. – N0rbert Jun 14 '18 at 16:06