Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop

I do use snaps on all of my Ubuntu installations but I’ve yet to be convinced that large desktop applications such as Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice are ready for inclusion into Ubuntu releases as snaps. I’ve seen too many reports of problems which seem to confirm this.

Ok, so we’ve been here before with the Chromium browser:

I’m not going to trawl through all the bug reports and Discourse posts but I seem to remember that it was the intention that most if not all of the bugs relating to the change would be fixed before the next LTS was released, i.e. Ubuntu 20.04. Obviously they weren’t as looking through the list of Chromium bugs which have been tagged as being related to the snap I see that there are 69 currently outstanding. Some of these reports were raised over three years ago:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bugs?field.tag=snap&orderby=id&start=0

Most users won’t care whether their issue is the fault of Firefox or snapd. I’ve tested the most recent stable snap and it appears to work well. I hope that when the change is made to a user’s system settings from their existing .deb installation are migrated. At that point I’ll do a more thorough check of Firefox’s integration into Ubuntu.

will no doubt be the most reported issue by GNOME users. This was first reported in January 2018 and will of course affect many Firefox users which I am sure greatly outnumber Chromium users.

On that basis I’m hoping that the Firefox transition to a snap will be more successful than the Chromium transition otherwise support sites will just advise users with issues to download Firefox directly from https://www.mozilla.org/ which is obviously not what Ubuntu and Mozilla are wanting.

These days I contribute to Ubuntu much less than I used to but I’ll certainly raise any issues that I might find or confirm any existing issues once the migration has been enabled.

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