How do nineteen months fly by so quickly? In some ways it feels like just yesterday that I made the difficult decision to leave my old role and, after over twenty long and fruitful years with my first and only real professional role, simply stop for a while.

In the over year and a half that followed, the world around me changed dramatically. The AI hype cycle truly took off with an investment bubble that has seen untold billions sunk into startups, large established players, and the picks-and-shovels companies that underpin the industry. In parallel, we saw increasing evidence of a white collar recession taking shape, with the software industry no exception. While I don’t personally believe the former trend has played much of a part in the latter, these parallel trends have seen the software industry disrupted in a way it hasn’t been since the dot-com crash of 2000.

Meanwhile, the political landscape has been utterly transformed. As the alt-right continued to rise and eventually take power in our neighbour to the south, we’ve seen sustained pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, and a decline in support for investing that takes into account environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, with some of that pushback taking the form of real changes to the legal and regulatory landscape in the US.

As if that weren’t enough, in the first quarter of 2025 we’ve seen a sustained attack on Canadian sovereignty, as the new American administration has begun to wage an economic war on this country while cozying up to strongman dictators across the globe.

I genuinely don’t remember the last time the world felt this… precarious.

As you can imagine, given this context, I was more than a little anxious about beginning the hunt for a new job.

So imagine my surprise, back in late November, when a former colleague reached out after noticing I was open to work…

All I wanted to do was play music on my Steam Deck.

To be honest, I’m not 100% sure this will actually be useful to me in the long term, but it seemed like a fun thing to try, you know?

I hunted and hunted for an application that would work nicely on the deck and would integrate with my Navidrome installation, but nothing satisfied. The closest I got was Supersonic, but it didn’t play nicely with Gamescope

Eventually I concluded that my best bet would be to just run the Navidrome web application, but doing that with Chrome in gaming mode was clunky and a bit unsatisfying.

Then I remembered an experiment I ran a while back running web applications as a PWA with Firefox, and a light bulb went off.

Now, to be clear, this whole thing is a little silly, but it was fun and it worked well, so I figured I’d write it up just in case a) I needed it later, or b) someone else might want to give this a try.

First off, a critical security caveat: These instructions bust open the flatpak sandbox by giving Zen (or Firefox–you can adapt these same instructions to work with any FF-based browser) the ability to run executables on the host system.

Now, in my case, the alternative is running a native version of the browser via tarball or AppImage, so for me it’s six of one and a half dozen of the other. But you have been warned!

Secondly, I should note these instructions are specifically for getting a flatpak version of Zen (or Firefox) working with a native KeePassXC installation. If your KeePassXC install is also a flatpak, you’re gonna have to look elsewhere (I tend to use native packages as much as possible and only fall back on Flatpak when I have no other option).

With that disclaimer out of the way, here’s the instructions I lifted from this Github comment, but with a bit more exposition to make various assumptions in that comment explicit.