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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Probably because it requires less testing from Canonical. With snaps, Mozilla is wholly responsible for the entire distribution; they build a snap with specific library versions, test it, then ship it to users. With traditional packaging, Firefox uses system libraries, which means Canonical has to do additional testing to make sure Firefox still works with Ubuntu's library versions.

And yeah, you could probably fix that by shipping debs with a statically linked Firefox, but that's not how apt packaging is traditionally done.

At least that's my understanding of things.

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Debian does all the tests for Firefox and doesn't complain about it. Canonical made a shit decision to accept snap on such a crucial piece of software, it's not ready for prime time.

And the only version of Firefox I can see in Debian Stable's (and Testing's) package list is Firefox ESR 91. That's exactly the situation Canonical wants to avoid. The current version of Firefox is 104, and even the current version of Firefox ESR is 102.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/firefox Many disagree with this stance, but Testing is in an awkward position and I generally steer people away from using it over Stable or Sid because you get downsides of both without the strengths of either. I blame Debian with shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to communicating this. Testing is not a happy middle-ground, it's a test bed for stable. Staying on Sid gives you essentially a rolling release like Arch and it's plenty "stable" for regular desktop use and should anything break you'll get the fix (usually) faster than on testing.

Sorry for going on a bit of a rant under your post, but I run into this on the regular.

I agree. I chose to focus about stable because that's where Debian "does all the tests" for its packages. I just threw in testing because it happened to have the same version of Firefox, but maybe that muddied the waters a bit.

The fact that the latest Firefox is in rolling release distros/channels but not in stable ones does prove the point a bit; you can either get a new Firefox, or you can get a tested Firefox. I generally prefer rolling releases, but I've had Firefox break in weird ways on Arch from time to time. The only way to get a Firefox that's both well-tested and up to date is to use builds from Mozilla where libraries are bundled, such as with a snap or flatpak.

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