I have been an Ubuntu user for over a quarter century. I understand the reasons why snap is a superior packaging format to avoid unexpected behaviour from applications, and why it is particularly valuable to the Canonical customers who actually pay for Ubuntu.
Canonical periodically invokes “snap refresh” which means that I as a user do not have to worry about it. When I start up one of the apps I will always have the latest version as approved by Canonical. However I find that my Firefox browser is never updated. I know why. I am a web developer. That means that any time that I am not chatting on forums or watching cat videos I am on my Firefox browser testing the functionality of the web sites that I am responsible for. But that means when snap refresh comes around it “defers” the update of Firefox to a later time. But I never shut down my browser. I typically have more than a dozen tabs open because that is what you do when you are testing a web site. If I shut down Firefox I lose all of those tabs. So even when I drag myself away from my computer to grab a few hours of sleep, Firefox is still running, and the updates are deferred.
I would like the advice of the community on possible techniques I can use to maintain Firefox on the most current snap while not losing work? I have searched a number of websites and the only advice I have been given is to stop working long enough to issue a manual snap refresh, and then spend the next couple of hours recovering all of the sub-projects I was working on.
For example it would save time if when the daemon found that it couldn’t update Firefox, it at least downloaded the package from the server so when I do issue snap refresh I do not have to sit around for a minute or so while it downloads the package.