I installed the chromium snap and it works beautifully. The only issue I’m facing is that chrome gnome shell, which is required to install Gnome Shell extensions from extensions.gnome.org does not appear to work with the snap. Is there a way to work around this?
chromium looks for the messaging extension (used to communicate with gnome-shell) in /etc/chromium/native-messaging-hosts/, which appears to be allowed by the apparmor profile:
$ grep -n “/etc/chromium” /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap.chromium.chromium 1250:/etc/chromium/{,**} r,
stracing the snap reveals that /usr/bin/chrome-gnome-shell cannot be found in the context of the snap:
15760 access(“/usr/bin/chrome-gnome-shell”, F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
This is not an apparmor denial. Inside the snap’s execution environment, /usr/bin is in fact /snap/core/current/usr/bin.
I filed bug #1741074 to track the issue.
Discussion to figure out a solution is continuing at Native messaging support in strictly-confined browser snaps. Please refrain from “me too” or “+1”-like comments (but valid use cases that weren’t mentioned yet or suggestions are welcome).