I have several wallmounted RPi3 with the official touchscreen and now I’m in the process of making the whole thing work… and it turns out I haven’t expected Firefox in Raspbian not being able to connect to HA.
I was planning to use the Lovelace UI I’m working on with the RPi3s… and When loging in… I get the following error message:
When reading the Web Console in the Firefox Developer section, I get:
Error submitting step SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected non-whitespace character after JSON data at line 1 column 5 of the JSON data
I’ve read a little about this issue and apparently the issue has been resolved in a later version. Problem is that Raspbian is only compatible with Firefox 52.9.0 ESR… and versions over 54 aren’t compatible with Raspbian anymore due to an unresolved issue (see answer)
When I download the Firefox 52.9.0 ESR version for MacOS, I’m having the very same issue…
The reason why I wanted to use Firefox instead of Chromium is the latter seems having some issues with custom-cards as NONE of those are showing at all (see picture).
It really looks like if you’d like to have a Raspberry Pi attached to the official touchscreen AND use Lovelace, then using Ubuntu MATE 18.04 might be the solution!
With Ubuntu MATE 18.04, you get the regular Firefox version (Not ESR):
And from there, I can successfully log into HA without any problems! Turns out there is really a bug with Firefox ESR 52… and since Firefox dropped the support for Raspbian, chances are you will need to switch for Ubuntu MATE. That being said, you still have the choice to use AppDaemon instead of Lovelave if you really want to stick with Raspbian (as Ubuntu MATE uses more resources).
Now I going to ask a real stupid question. Raspbian is a debian fork. Ubuntu is a debian fork. Since both run on a raspberry pi, is it not possible to install regular firefox on raspbian ?
Not a stupid question at all! I was under the same impression as you and it turns out it seems like it is something in Raspbian itself that prevents newer versions of Firefox from running.
I’ve used a custom repo to get the latest Firefox (non-ESR) build for RPi and when trying to run it from within Raspbian, the process starts and stops a few seconds later, no error message, nothing. From Ubuntu MATE 18.04, it just works!
I am not planning to investigate any further because I have a solution now that works just fine… but, yeah, like you said, both are forks from Debian… so I was feeling like one would behave the same way as the other… but no!
I think there is something odd with the frontend on HA 0.101.x, I used to be able to login OK using Safari 9.3.5 on HA 0.99.x but no longer in HA 0.101.x
I know Firefox 52 is not the latest version but it would be nice it could be made to work again, many people still use it who are using older or less common CPU’s.
Really? Just out of curiosity, what is the error message you are getting when trying to log in using Safari 9.3.5?
Firefox 52 is having a problem with the way it parses the JSON. This issue has been discussed for many other web app other than HA… so chances are it is not an issue from HA but Firefox.
