It seems like the Chromium snap takes longer to start than the .deb and support for desktop “app” generation through .desktop files remains completely broken.
Reference: How to expose desktop files created by snaps to the DE?
If you go to “More Tools… Create Shortcut / Open In New Window”, you should end up with a new “app” that you can find in the launcher and will have it’s own icon and handling when added to the dock.
The flow to create a new “app” finishes without error in the Snap now, yet no app is found in the launcher and the new app is grouped with the original Chromium app in
the dock.
I tried to workaround this issue by installing the “.deb” instead of the “.snap”, but this did
not work. The .deb file redirects to install the snap instead.
This is very frustrating. Now to get Chromium working again on Ubuntu I either have to track down a non-snap / non-deb version or switch to a Linux distribution with non-broken Chromium package.