De-Snaping and Firefox without Snap

[arsivci]

On my machine, it takes 13 seconds and change after a cold boot.

[arsivci]

On my machine, it takes 13 seconds and change after a cold boot.

Second launch takes 3:43 seconds.

[oshunluvr]

I haven't had to deal with Snap so I'm kind of confused by it all. I'm still planning on waiting until July to upgrade, maybe they will change their mind by then. but I doubt it since it's Canonical idea. If it doesn't work for me then I'll find another distro.

Why? As I posted, it takes like 20 seconds to completely remove snapd.

[oshunluvr]

I have been having trouble with Firefox snap being slow, so I decided to give this approach a go. I found that by following the procedures that Firefox was still installed so I used muon to complete the removal of Firefox snap. Also, I fortunately had a .mozilla file in my Home as the snap versions were removed and nothing is left in the snap folder.

I was able to install Firefox without snap and its response to initial launch is much much faster. The system still wants to install Firefox snap so I locked it and marked it for removal.

Thanks very much for the approach to take - even though it was a little tricky to get it working.

I haven't tried it, but from what I've read if you set the Mozilla PPA as higher priority than the PPA containing FF snap version, your system will not default back to the snap version.

[Snowhog]

As to Snap FF, I've also found it to be INCREDIBLY SLOW to launch initially; up to 30+ seconds! It's so slow in fact, that I sometimes find myself asking if it died during the launch process. I don't know how any developer (of Snap packages) can find this even remotely acceptable.

[Montmorency]

Is it possible to know how large (in mb) is the Snap Firefox?

[Fred47]

Why? As I posted, it takes like 20 seconds to completely remove snapd.

The idea of a proprietary format being pushed on us just because Ubuntu is big and can bothers me. Reports of it being slow and bloated don't help either. To that end I'm going to have to test probably before July and see how it goes.

[arsivci]

Is it possible to know how large (in mb) is the Snap Firefox?

Discover shows it to be 155.6 MB.

[Montmorency]

Discover shows it to be 155.6 MB.

And yet I suspect there's more.

[Fred47]

I have Snap turned off in the repository of 20.04 ran the command sudo du -sh /var/lib/snapd and found 1.5 Gb of data.

[arsivci]

And yet I suspect there's more.

Yes, there is: bare, core20, gtk-common-themes, gnome-something... They are not part of FF but required by snap

[oshunluvr]

For those who didn't catch it yet but want to use Firefox without Snap, I did a more complete write-up here.

[verndog]

I download firefox*bzip2 @ "https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/linux/"
Extract it to "/opt".
Create a .desktop" @ "/.local/share/applications", like so:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
Exec=/opt/firefox/firefox-bin %u
Name=Firefox
Comment=Custom definition for Firefox[code][Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Firefox
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
GenericName=Web Browser
Keywords=Internet;WWW;Browser;Web;Explorer
Exec=/opt/firefox/firefox %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false

Its simple.

[Bings]

Installed 22.04 today and the first thing I did was follow oshunluvr's guide It's ridiculous how slow firefox is on first start up with snap, this is probably the silliest idea since amazon integration in unity.

[private_lock]

I was skeptical of all this snap stuff myself - but mostly it seems bad press to me ... So far, I could identify only one broken addon having issues with the sandbox:
https://github.com/darktrojan/openwith/issues/334

But on the plus side, finally after years of loathing the GNOME-File-Dialogs that on every switch of a folder bother me with a useless popup that I had to cancel, finally I get QT-style file choosers for free. Now I don't need to park every file in ~/Downloads before I move it to the final destination folder.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3329