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Ubuntu will get a lot of hate for the switch to snap for Firefox even though this is driven by Mozilla and a lot of the arguments used against it just aren't true anymore. Frankly I think it this move makes perfect sense and I would wager that the vast majority of users won't even notice the change

It does make perfect sense but you know haters will hate. They can use whatever they fish if they don't like what's being offered. Sadly they don't seem to get this in the midst of their negativity i suppose

I never had issues with snaps nor flatpaks!!

The quote below is enough for one to say "No thanks" :D
Not that it would be the only reason, there are already many to list, starting with the... distro's name...

Migrating the single most critical pieces of software on an Ubuntu install to a package format regularly criticised as slow and buggy is a brave move.

So hey: kudos for that.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/09/ubuntu-makes-firefox-snap-default


Last edited by sudoer on 24 September 2021 at 9:02 am UTC

bashing snaps has now officially gotten old.

Ubuntu will get a lot of hate for the switch to snap for Firefox even though this is driven by Mozilla and a lot of the arguments used against it just aren't true anymore. Frankly I think it this move makes perfect sense and I would wager that the vast majority of users won't even notice the change

I'd say the major problem I encountered are slow first starts of applications. BUT: this seems more an issue of the packaged application and not Snap per se. Blender as snap starts pretty much instantly. Chrome was once utterly atrocious, now I have a two or three seconds overhead. The Zoom client is about the same. Jetbrains IDEs went from "quite acceptable" to total garbage (we are talking about 1 minute or more startup time on an SSD system - starting it from their own launcher takes a mere seconds). Subsequent starts were/are always fast.

As far as "resource hunger" goes: Both memory footprint and mass storage usage hardly make a difference (if packaged properly).
PHPStorm will eat up <500MB as (compressed) snap package and 1.4GB as (uncompressed) binaries.


Last edited by Tuxee on 24 September 2021 at 10:02 am UTC

bashing snaps has now officially gotten old.

old as the last week... sooooooooooo old.

snap & flat are unusable on my (4 years old) laptop: slow as snails, kilotons of memory needed, bugs/freezing etc.

But yeah, on my 4k€ gear at work, no trouble...
after, you can spam the discussion with your good feelings, saying that's not snap. But whatever, if snap allows bad utilizations, thus it means it is rotten by design.

Will try again in one month on my laptop. With the truly hope to change my mind on snap

edit:
by reading a bit, you find these gems:

(17 September 2021) Ubuntu removed a couple of Snap apps it loaded by default due to their (comparatively) poor performance and quirky behaviour to repo versions.

nice discussion
Jorge Castro @castrojo 25 juil. 2021: It just took _10 full seconds_ for 1password to launch on my desktop, in case you were wondering if Canonical is working on performance for snapd.

Alan Pope @popey 25 juil. 2021: They get ignored or dismissed. The CTO flat doesn't believe there's a problem. The team is understanffed and there is no motivation from IoT and enterprise focused people to fix desktop problems. Been trying from the inside for *years*. I gave up hope and left.

but it is soooooo old bashing snap
!ok


Last edited by Geppeto35 on 24 September 2021 at 12:25 pm UTC

i heard snaps are propreitary. is that true?

No. They are not. The Snap Store is not Open Source.
If you want to check the rest of the code:

https://github.com/snapcore

Edit: Naturally you can bundle proprietary software as snaps - which is probably their prime use case.
Edit 2: It seems as if Mozilla preferred the packaging as snap.


Last edited by Tuxee on 24 September 2021 at 3:27 pm UTC

Well, I'd whine about this. But Firefox seems to be rotting to death anyway. It's a pity, because fundamentally I like Firefox better. I like how its UI behaves more than I like Chrome, especially around how it handles going full screen, so if both were equally functional I'd stick to Firefox. But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff. It's like I'm constantly having to copy the url and paste it into Chrome. So at the rate things are going it may not matter how it's packaged.

Not like I use Ubuntu, or snaps, so it's not really my business anyway I suppose.

But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.

Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.

Been using snap version for Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, and Libreoffice since the beginning. They have been really great in my experience. All those arguments about slow startup, not looking part of the system are pretty much moot at the point.

But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.

Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.

Huh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.

Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication.

Comment threads on CBC seems to work fine here, Firefox 90.0. EBSCO I can't test (I just mooch journals off Sci-Hub).

Try temporary creating a new profile for Firefox (firefox -P from a terminal) for a fresh setup.

But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.

Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.

Huh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.

Adblock can slaughter some webpages. (I have a PiHole running on my router and Google AdSense won't work (on any browser) before I turn it of.) On cbc.ca 28(!) resources are blocked by uBlock Origin. Turning of uBlock PiHole blocks some more requests AND the "Facebook Container" add-on.

But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.

Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.

Huh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.

Just tested it with Firefox 92.0 and with Adblock Plus on and I could see the comments section on the first article on CBC website. So it's probably some other extension.

But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.

Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.

Huh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.

Just tested it with Firefox 92.0 and with Adblock Plus on and I could see the comments section on the first article on CBC website. So it's probably some other extension.

Looking at the Firefox I'm using at work, I do have Adblock Plus and one other extension . . . but they're both disabled already, so I dunno.

Ubuntu will get a lot of hate for the switch to snap for Firefox even though this is driven by Mozilla and a lot of the arguments used against it just aren't true anymore. Frankly I think it this move makes perfect sense and I would wager that the vast majority of users won't even notice the change

Not really driven by Mozilla since they cannot dictate what Ubuntu does or doesn't do. Sounds more that Ubuntu wants to no longer have to rebuild Firefox for every release and just hand that and support off to Mozilla.

My issue with this is how it will effect extensions, I remember when Chrome moved from a deb to snap in one version of Ubuntu and none of the databases from the extensions where moved over and simply deleted from the machines at work.

And this will probably not be a problem with Firefox since it should really only have access to the Downloads folder but since Ubuntu moved Totem from deb to snap it can only open videos from a few specific locations which e.g means that it refuses to play videos included as extra or DLC in games from Steam unless I copy the file to the Desktop first.

But I've been forced more and more to switch to Chrome (or rather, at home at least, Chromium) because I hit more and more websites Firefox just doesn't manage to load, or can't show article comments, or stuff.

Could you share some examples? Being a web developer I would be genuinely interested in such pages, because so far I haven't come across such websites (or rather these which showed quirks showed - different - quirks in Blink based browsers, too). And since I web development is my daily job, I'd say nowadays you have to put in some real effort to get something to work on Chrom(e|ium) but not on Firefox.

Huh. Maybe it has something to do with extensions, then. Perhaps I'm typically using an adblock on Firefox but not Chrome? I should do a bit of experimenting.
Examples that stand out in my mind are articles on the CBC website (that's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's BBC equivalent), where Chrome seems to show the conversation threads below but Firefox does not, and EBSCO, a major player in scholarly journal publication. I work in a university library and often have reasons to follow links to articles in our holdings. Chrome shows Ebsco articles no problem, Firefox shows a blank page. The problems seem to be the same on Windows at work and on Linux at home.

Just tested it with Firefox 92.0 and with Adblock Plus on and I could see the comments section on the first article on CBC website. So it's probably some other extension.

Looking at the Firefox I'm using at work, I do have Adblock Plus and one other extension . . . but they're both disabled already, so I dunno.

So Wizards and Warlocks then... The web have become far to complex.

even though this is driven by Mozilla

Mozilla says it's Canonical building the snap packages: "Canonical is now building the official Firefox snap"
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0beta/releasenotes/

Probably not the answer you guys want, but you can actually run Firefox from your home directory. Just download the file from Mozilla, decompress it wherever you want and execute the binary. I used it that way for years because Canonical usually take a week to release a package of the new version.

even though this is driven by Mozilla

Mozilla says it's Canonical building the snap packages: "Canonical is now building the official Firefox snap"
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0beta/releasenotes/

From the linked article:

Wait, why the change?

Good question! When Mozilla approached Canonical, they had some clear benefits in mind. Those included:

Cross-platform support: The snap will run on all distributions that run snapd - now and in the future
Authenticity: You’re getting Firefox, unadulterated, straight from the source
Effortless updates: Get security updates from Mozilla, fast
Less time on maintenance, more time for features: Community developers can focus on innovation, instead of being mired in support

The Firefox snap is listed on snapcraft as being from Mozilla.