Call for testing: chromium-browser deb to snap transition

APT just forced me to transition from Deb to Snap. Lost user profile, NOTHING got migrated. Stuck with snap’s GTK theme instead of the one I use. Who’s idea was it to move to SNAP? Just WHY?

Everything was great using deb now we’re 100% stuck with snap. I had to install the entire snapd to migrate. So now I need to run snapd + chromium via snap. A bigger, more resource hungry and buggier version. Ultimately snapd is going to be the Ubuntu thing that makes me switch to another distro…

Just FYI: I was able to move my profile over (copied ~/.config/chromium to ~/snap/chromium/.config)

Just curious: Apt tells me I still have the chromium-browser but I cannot call apt remove on it says it says it’s not installed. What kind of black magic is that? Also any way bypassing this at all?

This seems like a normal AskUbuntu-type of support request that seems unrelated to the snap discussion.

Hey there, just got the update to snap : user agent changed from apt version and WhatsApp webapp recognizes chromium as an old version of Chrome. So app refuses to work. I expect to see this more on other sites I didn’t test yet, and yes a user switcher is a workaround but definitly not the real solution.

I’ve managed to silence the audit warnings like this:

sudo sed -i '/^}/ {
i
i # added by Lucas, 2020-02-04
i # based on https://askubuntu.com/a/953988/854071, incl. comment by Paul A Jungwirth
i @{PROC}/@{pid}/mem r,
}' /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap.chromium.chromedriver
sudo systemctl reload apparmor

(Hand-editing /var/lib/ files seems evil, but I couldn’t find an equivalent place below /etc. If you try this you’ll want to adjust the comment a bit, of course.)

But that doesn’t fix the chromedriver error at all – it still fails in the same way, only now there’s no more messages in the journal about it.

Note that the apparmor files in /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/... will get re-written on every:

  • chromium snap update
  • snapd/core snap update
  • system reboot

So while this may be a fine workaround to remove the messages, it’s not a persistent solution.

I’m going to take a stab and assume that ChromeDriver is trying to use ptrace permissions, which are silenced because they can get very noisy for some applications. Can you start a new LP bug (or maybe there’s an existing one?) or forum.snapcraft.io post about this for us (snapd developers) to investigate? Thanks

A post was split to a new topic: Not quite sure

Chromium is crashing for me when trying to upload files to Google Drive, Apple’s iCloud or to personal filespace elsewhere. I see the crash on Ubuntu but not on Xubuntu, both 20.04.

Reported as bug #1863801.

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Would you mind filing a bug for this?

The correct path is ~/snap/chromium/current/.config. Note that there is some logic to copy over an existing profile folder the first time the snap is run, so this should be transparent to users. Could it be that you already had the snap installed but were not using it (so there would already be a profile folder and the import mechanism was skipped)?

As suggested by Ian, please file a bug against apt with the details of the commands you’re running and their output. Thanks.

Still having the issue FTR.

Giving my update, running latest Chromium on Kubuntu 19.10, and it is literally snappier than ever. Loads up like normal deb applications, looks great (breeze dark), supports mouse theme. One little annoyance (minor at that) is the open dialog looks

.

Indeed, and this is a known bug.

Thanks for the feedback!

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@oSoMoN I was looking at the code you posted to alert users when the snap has been refreshed while running, and I noticed a comment in the launcher code about the password store and password-manager-service interface. Out of curiousity, I checked my Chromium snap install, and this interface was not connected. Should it be connected by default?

This was discussed at length in another thread, the reasons why the password-manager-service interface isn’t auto-connected are well argumented there.

Thanks, searched here, but not there. I wish you could search both the Snapcraft discourse and this one at the same time :wink:

For the record, I’ve discovered that asking chromium-driver to run chromium in headless mode made the problem go away.

I still haven’t managed to collect enough understanding about the breakage to file a bug.

That’s a good finding! I must admit I didn’t test running chromedriver outside of headless mode. Please file a bug so we can track the issue and investigate it further. Thanks.

For the record, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apport/+bug/1871185 makes reporting a snap bug Really Annoying.

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Filed https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1874415