Updater is disabled when tor-browser is run by torbrowser-launcher flatpak

I remember there are a few checks in place in the updater code that checks if the browser is distributed through flatpak.

Is there any way to override these checks? This issue is a critical priority thing for the Tor Browser Launcher Flatpak that has over 700k users (unique installations).

Yes, we can change the code, but is it going to work?

I'm not a Flatpak expert, but I guess Firefox has these checks in place for some reasons. If I understand correctly, Flatpak usually is read-only... But maybe that's only for the launcher? After all, the browser itself is data, from the launcher point of view, not the program.

It should work. As you pointed out, in case of the Tor Browser Launcher Flatpak, only the launcher is on a read-only file system, unlike regular Firefox Flatpak.

I'm not a Flatpak expert, but I guess Firefox has these checks in place for some reasons.

Yes, I think those checks make sense for normal flatpaks (which we plan to provide in the future), but not in the case of torbrowser-launcher flatpak, so we should disable this check only when run from torbrowser-launcher.

I'm not sure we have an easy way to detect that torbrowser-launcher is being used, so I opened torbrowser-launcher#8 (closed).

I'm not sure we have an easy way to detect that torbrowser-launcher is being used, so I opened torbrowser-launcher#8 (closed).

That's a very nice idea and it would definitely help (if we know we have an environment variable for that, we can just early return on any checks).

As I already pointed out, Firefox has these checks because there is an official Firefox Flatpak that is updated directly as a part of the Flatpak. This is not the case for Tor Browser and most likely never will. Thus, there is no reason for Tor Browser to also contain these checks and no need to overcomplicate things by adding extra torbrowser-launcher specific checks, at least in my opinion. :-)

As I already pointed out, Firefox has these checks because there is an official Firefox Flatpak that is updated directly as a part of the Flatpak. This is not the case for Tor Browser and most likely never will. Thus, there is no reason for Tor Browser to also contain these checks and no need to overcomplicate things by adding extra torbrowser-launcher specific checks, at least in my opinion. :-)

We are planning to make some official Tor Browser Flatpak at some point (first for Mullvad Browser, but after that for Tor Browser too).

What boklm said .

Thus, there is no reason for Tor Browser to also contain these checks and no need to overcomplicate things by adding extra torbrowser-launcher specific checks, at least in my opinion. :-)

Generally speaking, adding is easier than removing and replacing.