The venerable Firefox Plugin "Video Download Helper" has been a mainstay of internet video downloading for years. However since I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 it can not ever find the "Companion App" it needs to work.

(I did not find a satisfactory answer in this related question.)

Suspecting it was the sand-boxing used in the Firefox snap package, I removed that and used the .deb package as per the instructions on OMG Ubuntu install Firefox as a .deb.

I've tried both the .tar.gz and .deb versions of the companion app. When the app installs, it reports that it's installed correctly:

# sudo ./net.downloadhelper.coapp-1.6.3/bin/net.downloadhelper.coapp-linux-64 install --system
VdhCoApp: VdhCoApp is ready to be used

But then in the plugin does not work (tried restarting firefox, reinstalling plugin, etc.). If you go into the plugin configuration, there's a Recheck button in the "Verifying Companion App..." section, but clicking it does not seem to do anything.

How can I make this plugin work with Firefox 100.0.2 on Ubuntu 22.04?

EDIT: Same question for 21.10, with possibly useful answers.

2 Answers

i left the snap firefox package, launching it out of the sandbox with the command /snap/firefox/current/usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin and installing extension the companion app get recognized.

so i modified /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/firefox_firefox.desktop with the same command to launch it out the sandbox from the icon

don't know if it will survive an upgrade and if it is safe or not

4

The best solution that worked for me was to uninstall firefox snap and install the deb package. This post was very helpful, now download helper works fine with its companion app.

1

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