The preset “vault” VM has Firefox in its menu by default (in my installation, at least), although the VM is intended to be offline. Indeed there might be some situations where we want to open HTML documents in an offline environment, but it seems strange to me to do such thing on the vault VM in particular.
What are the intended use-cases of Firefox on the vault VM? Otherwise, is it just unchanged from other AppVMs?
This is the explanation.
Those default AppVMs are not really special. (You could create your own “vault” and it’d effectively be the same.) They’re just created by default because they’re expected to be common use cases and to provide you with some examples. Feel free to configure or delete as you see fit.
One case where they may be more useful is if you’re new to Qubes and don’t really know what you’re doing. In that case, having a default vault with no NetVM may be useful, since you may not know to do that yourself when creating your own vault.
Thank you for your response, Andrew!
Yes, I had removed Firefox from the menu of the vault VM, but I was curious if there is any use-case I have unnoticed.
I am actually new to Qubes OS, and it really helps to understand important concepts of the system that there are DispVMs and AppVMs from different TemplateVMs, AppVMs with and without NetVM, and AppVMs with the same settings and different labels in the preset.
I have just started learning and trying how I can adapt my workflow and habits to Qubes, and it is so exciting!
Just as you’ve said, Firefox is used for offline HTML files. I make use of that all the time in the vault. There are also browser games you can mirror with Python’s HTTP server and play offline as well.
Thank you for sharing your tips, @aquser!
I’ve never come up with browser gaming in an air-gapped VM but it seems so cool.