this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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What's wrong with snap?
Firefox snap on raspberry pi was mostly unusable, the deb worked fine, as an example.
It's really slow on my older Chromebox converted to Ubuntu. Starting Firefox would take longer than 30 seconds to start when on snap vs native binary.
Snap caused me to move my older PCs from Ubuntu to Debian or Linux Mint
Nothing. Like there's nothing wrong with Flatpak either.
However, the Flatpak/Snap version of Firefox have some issues. Especially with some browser extensions that need to communicate with tools/apps installed on your system. Their sandboxed nature prevents them from doing so.
For example, a browser extension for a password manager won't be able to communicate with your local password vault app. A video downloader extension won't be able to use the download tool or access the folders you want. Etc.
And the problem here is that in Ubuntu flavors, Firefox is exclusively available as a Snap package from Ubuntu's official repos. So you can't install a .deb. You have to add the external mozilla repos to your sources to do so.
This becomes a bit too technical for most users who are not very tech literate.
Snap provides ways for extensions to communicate with other apps (and AFAIK Flatpak does too, but I haven't used a browser Flatpak in a while). The Plasma Integration extension uses these.