Chromium browser issues in Ubuntu 19.10

snap
1

When I use apt to install chromium-browser in Ubuntu 19.10, the actual package is actually from snap, chromium Version 79.0.3945.79 (Official Build) snap (64-bit). However this brings me two issues

  • chromium now has no sound when playing videos on YouTube, Vimeo, etc (pulseaudio/alsa both tried; local applications can play video perfectly fine).
  • Whenever I need to open a downloaded file, it always pops up a window to ask Allow snap "chromium" to open file "$HOME/Downloads"?, which is quite annoying.

Is there any workaround for this?

2

Yep this is an issue. With neither the snap or deb installed, both are installed with sudo apt install chromium-browser. See full stdout.

I duplicated the double install part on a fresh, updated ubuntu 19.10 vm, however the sounds in youtube works just fine for me.

I just learned that the chromium-browser deb is not being maintained by either Canonical or Debian any longer. So the redirecting you to install the snap is intentional.

3

The transition from deb to snap is intentional, starting with 19.10. Details: Call for testing: chromium-browser deb to snap transition

I can’t reproduce the audio issue here, please file a bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser

4

That’s the intended behaviour. Not perfect from a UX perspective, but this is a security requirement.

As suggested by Ken, please file a bug by running this command in a terminal:

ubuntu-bug chromium-browser

Thanks!

5

Note this will be better handled when Bug #1857128 “Missing configuration option to allow a snap to op...” : Bugs : Snappy is resolved.

1 Like
6

It seems an audio issue relevant with snap user/group privileges. I’m actually using Xubuntu 19.10.

  • When I login I saw xfce pulseaudio plugin shows an x. The ps shows me that pulseaudio is running and indeeded owned by me. However pulseaudio -k keeps telling me that Failed to kill daemon: No such process and there should not be any issues about my local settings since ~/.config/pulse is freshly generated. At this time, I can use chromium-browser to play YouTube videos with sound, however it will affect/be affected by other audio software such as cmus – when I pause cmus, I cannot play YouTube videos in chromium-browser since the progress bar does not advance.
  • So I kill -9 $(pidof pulseaudio) (may need multiple times since pulseaudio keeps restarting) and then pulseaudio -D. This time xfce pulseaudio plugin shows correctly. But there is no sound in chromium-browser. When I install firefox from apt or google-chrome (downloaded deb package), they both have sound.

I hear that snap packages have specific security mechanisms compared to natively installed ones. So what do you propose that I can report to launchpad?

7

Please file a bug with all the above information, that will be a good starting point, and we can take it from there. Thanks!