Hi everyone,
Yep, I'm afraid I'm a firejail dev.
About the "dev" work -- I've been contributing to it pretty steadily since early 2016 so I'm a bit attached to it... hopefully I'll be as objective as possible but apologies in advance.
until they can make it easily used by everything we use in a Linux environment, not just the select few.
It's impossible to make everything easily used for ever single user case.
Brave is a moving target. They've just changed their backend from muon to blink, I believe -- a huge change on their part. Firejail was not working with the new version because of their changes, not ours. Now we have already made all known changes necessary for the new Brave to work... but we're not psychic and can't possibly fix firejail ahead of time.
Firejail also has different versions (because we do manage to fix a bug once in a while, believe it or not
) and you folks who install from the repositories (a) usually have a pretty old version, (b) can't get our fixes for situations like this, and (c) can't get our fixes for situations like this.
We can get Brave fixed into the main firejail code upstream, but you might have to wait a while before the fixes make their way to you -- again, this is not something that is under firejail's control. I personally would recommend you use the
PPA. It usually has the newest releases -- however, this is
not technically "official". If you want to make sure you always get the latest version, you need to install directly from us.
On the other hand, we can't push out a new release for every single little bug that we fix. So even if Brave quits working, we'll
always provide fixes but we probably won't release the next version of firejail just because. Other bugs need squashing too and we have to do testing, etc.
not one single thing he came up with as well as any one else here on the forums could make it work for me
The relevant Brave thread, I believe, ended with a single post from me saying I had sent a fix for your issue to firejail. I posted once, and that's the only time we've interacted about firejail, I believe. The same thread also contained someone recommending you contact me for additional help. Nothing ever came of that -- and of course, you don't
have to contact me, but if you aren't going to, then I can't try to fix the issue. In fact, I'd be completely unaware of that post's existence (or this one's) if I didn't stumble across it.
(
And if people don't contact software developers to let them know what is going wrong with their project, and instead just call it "garbage", then no one is happy and the software never gets fixed unless a developer happens to stumble across the exact same error.)
Although we ask that people open bug reports of ask for help on GitHub (so multiple brains can mull over the issue), I recognise that not everyone wants to open a new account on another website, so I'm always open if you want to contact me through private message. For example, I've been tracking a single firejail bug here through private messages for upward of 6 months.
someone who has Brave working along with firejail lay out explicit instructions they can prove makes it work without jumping through flaming hoops and hurdles like a trained circus dog
I will have that up for you within 2 days if you'll tell me what version of Mint you run so I can tailor the instructions to your exact needs.
browsers being the number one thing that MUST work in firejail
Agreed.
if chromium browser works in firejail but a chromium based browser like Brave cannot
But here's the key error. It's
based on chromium. It's
not chromium. Brave makes all kind of changes, so it's not a simple one-size-fits all solution for chromium-based browsers.
That would be like saying, if it works in Debian, but not Linux Mint, it must be the linux kernel developers' fault. No. Changes, by definition, mean there will be unintended or unavoidable consequences.
But even if it were, Brave's old UI (the 'Muon" base) was Electron-based, not chromium. Sure, there are lots of similarities, but there's another level of abstraction too. So it's no surprise that our old Brave profile doesn't work for the new Brave.
Admittedly, our documentation could use a bit of work, but that's already being worked on behind the scenes.
any chromium based browser such as BRAVE which is one of the better secured
I disagree -- and I mean absolutely no disrespect to the Brave devs. I use it myself on Windows. Brave has some new and admittedly cool features. But "new and cool" when it comes to coding usually means there are undiscovered bugs, security bugs included.
everyone and their cousin totes this as a great piece of software
Well, you know, some of do think it's great.
Cheers!
Fred