The initial migration from the deb of 21.04 to the Snap of 21.10 appeared to go smoothly, but once the dust had settled there appear to be a number of issues, which I will list here and add notes as I (hopefully) find solutions. Obviously suggestions welcome and the issues would be worth looking at for the 22.04 release.
The main issue of note is the default browser. The switch from the deb to the Snap does not change the default browser (or didn’t on my install). Instead I ended up with Chrome (also installed) as default. The option within Firefox to check and set itself as default does nothing (to be honest not entirely unexpected). Going into the Ubuntu/Gnome settings doesn’t offer Firefox as an option (although oddly it does offer Opera, which is also installed as a Snap and doesn’t offer Chrome - which is default and installed as a deb; choosing Opera also doesn’t actually change anything).
Secondary issue, that many may not notice, is that I had my download folder set to something other than the default ~/Downloads, and this setting was not migrated.
Third issue, the transition to the Snap broke my password manager. Arguably, again not unexpected as I use KeePassXC as a Snap and it doesn’t handle connection to a browser installed from a Snap. It would good if this was a handled somehow - ideally helping KeePassXC to work Snap to Snap, but at least a warning or choice not to switch to the Snap would be helpful.
Finally (for now?!), Firefox takes around 20 seconds to startup. Once again, not at all unexpected as all my Snaps have this issue - and my machine isn’t that old being a Ryzen 3600 with 64G RAM and running off an NVMe drive.
OK, an update already. I had already set Firefox to check that it was the default browser, but on several restarts it had not noticed it wasn’t / or just not asked me to change it. On an unrelated issue I logged out and switched from Wayland to X.org for my session and on starting Firefox it asked me whether to set it as the default, and choosing yes worked. I can also see it set in the Ubuntu / Gnome settings now, as well as Opera being an option. Odd.
Thank you very much for testing and for the feedback @aptanet!
Would you mind filing bugs on Mozilla’s bug tracker for each separate issue, making sure to specify in the title that they are snap-specific? This would be very helpful to make this feedback directly actionable.
There’s a meta-bug to track all snap-related issues, make sure to reference it in your bugs, this will help with tracking.
That issue is concerning and we want to get to the bottom of it, because it doesn’t affect everyone (I’ve never observed it myself), but it obviously gives a very bad perception of snaps (and rightly so).
Let’s use this thread to dig deeper into it, if you don’t mind giving us a hand in debugging.
Can you start by running snap run --trace-exec firefox and sharing the output here?
Also, if every single snap is affected, it would be helpful if you could run the same command for a bunch of them, including very simple ones like hello-world, and share the output for all your tests.
it looks like there is a 9.5 second gap between when the firefox.launcher script is started, and when it launches the real firefox executable. We’ve only got the cut, id, and getent calls, so it doesn’t sound like this can be blamed on the profile migration code.
Could this be time taken by the runtime linker to load the Firefox executable and all its libraries?
