With the release of Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, Canonical ended his last most controversial move. Since this April, Ubuntu and all its official flavors use Firefox as a snap, and you can't install the DEB version from the official repositories. Especially in networks, the reactions were immediate, the majority being critical, first, for the change and, second, for not allowing choice. And it is that the apps in snap do not open very quickly.
This is something that Canonical wants to fix. As we read in this note of his blog, which states that it is the first part, so more information is expected in the future, Mark Shuttheworth and company show off how well Ubuntu 22.04 works, to soon go on to talk to us about the famous firefox as snap. Of course, they mention the improvements, such as better security, compatibility and speed of updates, but they also recognize that the performance is not the best.
Canonical acknowledges that Firefox as a snap performs worse
Currently, this decision has trade-offs when it comes to performance, especially on the first launch of Firefox after a system reboot. A part of this is due to the inherent nature of sandboxing, however we believe there is still significant opportunity to improve boot times across the board.
After justifying his decision to switch to the snap version, he is now fully into talk about performance. There are three areas: the first is the performance of the cold launch, that is, the first time it is opened after a reboot; then there is the performance of the warm start, when it has already collected some information and opens faster; finally there is the performance when using the browser when it is already open, and here they have already made improvements.
In short, they have published information in which, in short, they admit that Firefox does not work so well now, but that they are going to do everything possible so that the difference is not noticeable. Work they have, since sometimes firefox as snap it may take 10s to open, but at least they know about the problem and are committed to eliminating it, or at least reducing it.