The official Firefox snap offers a number of benefits to daily users of Ubuntu, as well as a range of other Linux distributions. It improves security, delivers cross-release compatibility and shortens the time for improvements from Mozilla to get into the hands of end-users.

Since the user experience of our default browser is imperative to our work, we’ve made significant improvements to snap startup times and identified a number of additional issues to resolve along the way.

It’s been a while since our last update, but both Mozilla and the Canonical team have continued to make further improvements to the Firefox snap experience over the last few months. 

With some key features recently landed, we thought it was time to give the community a roundup of fresh news and fixes as we ramp up to the release of Ubuntu 23.04! Let’s start with our most… highly requested feature.

The pending update problem

While it’s good to know when a new update to Firefox is available, our previous messaging was generally regarded as heavy handed and hard to action. Users received a daily pop-up counting down to the automatic refresh of the snap. To dismiss this notification, users would need to run snap refresh firefox   from the command line (konsole) or visit Ubuntu Software to apply the update.

Snap users will be happy to know that we have implemented new functionality in snapd to streamline the refresh experience  for *all* desktop snaps. With this change, snaps will now download and pre-initialise an update (when available) in the background then wait for the app to close- or the system to reboot- before switching to the new version. This means users can apply updates immediately by closing the application, and those updates will be applied more quickly than before, minimising disruption.

This change landed as part of snapd 2.59, and is currently rolling out to all users with additional UI feedback on refresh status following shortly after. You can read more about the history behind our refresh implementation in our November blog post.

Take control of your snap updates

If you’re someone who wants more fine-grained control of the update frequency for snap applications, or wish to hold a snap on a particular version, we have implemented a new holdfeature for snaps. Read our blog about this functionality for more details.

source: https://snapcraft.io/blog/firefox-snap-updates-and-upgrades