Reinstalling Firefox snap deletes profile

[Andreas E.]

When I uninstalled the firefox snap and installed it, my firefox browsing history was reset to April.

After inspecting the sessionstore files (~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/iofx86n0.default/sessionstore-backups), I found that all previous backups also date back to the day when the firefox deb was updated to the firefox snap. They have freshly been copied from the traditional firefox profile directory (~/.mozilla/firefox/iofx86n0.default) although before I uninstalled the firefox snap there must have been more recent browsing history from today and yesterday.

Expected behavior:
When uninstalling a snap, it should not delete the profile (~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla).
When installing a snap, it should not migrate deb user config/data to the snap location if it there already exists.

Actual behavior:
Either uninstallation clears the snap user config/data.
Or migration of deb user config/data overwrites snap user config/data.

Kernel: Linux 5.15.0-43-generic
OS: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Firefox version before: 103.0.1-1 1635 latest/stable
Firefox version after: 103.0.2-1 1670 latest/stable

[stsp (stsp-0)]

firefox from snap doesn't work with
etokens. This is a known bug. The solution
is to uninstall the snap version and
install firefox-esr from PPA.
When, after that operation, you find
your profile entirely deleted, with
all passwords, credentials and histories,
you get into a "bad mood" quite deeply.
This bug is completely unacceptable.
Keeping it unfixed is completely
unacceptable. Authors of the snap's code
in question are completely unacceptable.
:(

[Tom Reynolds (tomreyn)]

This discusses how one may recover profile data after removing the Firefox snap (assuming snap created a snapshot before doing so):
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1439307/is-it-possible-to-recover-snap-firefox-secret-profile-data-after-removing-the-sn#answers

[Hauke Wintjen (hwintjen)]

Since firefox did not start reliably from KDE launcher anymore, i tried to re-install firefox snap.

Removing it failed with an error message like

device busy /home/hcw/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/amzdl79u.default-1400438410240/storage

Trying to re-install failed since it is still installed.

after snap enable firefox, my profile is gone.
No backup in /var/lib/snapd/snapshots/ (maybe because the backup failed due to the above error).

So my firefox profile is gone. I hate that. Pls fix this.

Dont remove my profile data (my firefox profile) when removing a snap!

The profile data should live in the home folder, but as it sounds, it is stored elsewhere (under snap) and so i dont have a backup of that data!