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by spaniard89277 1551 days ago
Firefox is only available as snap now. I gues it's bthe same for other apps.

For VSCode I managed to download a deb from their site IIRC, but from apt it only suggests to download from snap.

3 comments

Interesting. Firefox on snap was an absolute nightmare. Not only would New Tab break after an update, fonts would break as they may be (re-)loaded from disk which becomes missing when the app gets remounted at a new mount point after an update. I forget which hoops I had to jump through, but I did finally find a non-snap method that allows me to manually update (or dismiss prompt) to get around these issues while staying up to date (~1 day)

VScode wasn't as bad, as it usually seemed to work (but maybe flaky plugins were actually caused by snap?) but it was certainly annoying to lose the ability to switch between windows of the same app (alt+~, I think this was a custom setting to resemble mac) if the latest window/project was opened as a new version of the app (alt+tab)

FF has been driving me crazy lately.

Every other day it blows away all my open tabs and whatever I had going on in them.

I have a bunch of random tabs open, some with essentially "unsaved work", like shopping carts which may be the result of an hour of research, editing files in web interfaces like github or fluidd (web interface to a 3d printer) ... and randomly once every day or 3, I'll go to touch anything, any button in any of those tabs, like edit that config file some more, or try to save it... and kablooey, "firefox needs to restart" and I lose everything I had going.

This is a new thing that didn't used to happen.

Apparently the snap teams response to this story would be "Don't use FF like that."

I have a similar situation.

The issue here is that the apt update changes firefox program files underneath it which needs a restart. Afaik, using the mozilla release directly is the only solution for this where the program files are changed only after exit.

Edit: This has become more common nowadays due to multiple point releases close to each other, to fix some important bug.

What, where is firefox only available as snap? I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 so haven't run into that yet.
flatpak is a great alternative and it works well on ubuntu. Although I've just moved wholesale over to pop_os with flatpaks and LTS version.