[snap] Firefox snap is reinstalled on a new release

[Ali Akbar]

I have removed the Firefox snap and installed through the official Mozilla apt repositories as instructed here [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions] but there are two annoyances that I've come across so far:

1. Upon installation by `apt` I have to add the `--allow-downgrades` even though the apt version has exactly the same version as snap one
2. Everytime a new version is released, the snap package is reinstalled and takes over the deb package one when clicking the desktop shortcut to launch.

I guess all of these stem from the issue that Ubuntu somehow treats the Snap variant as the newer release!
AFAIK this is special to Ubuntu 24.04 and did not notice such behavior on 22.04.

[Amin Bandali (bandali)]

Hello,

Point (1) is indeed to be expected, because the 'firefox' deb package provided by Ubuntu itself (which has a purpose of serving as a thin wrapper around the Firefox snap and adding some system integration for it) has a version 'epoch' of '1' (e.g. in '1:1snap1-0ubuntu5' that is the '1' before the ':'), whereas the deb package from Mozilla's repositories has the default epoch of '0'. Therefore to dpkg, the one with the higher epoch (i.e. Ubuntu's) is seen as newer. As such, I believe specifying '--allow-downgrades' is necessary when installing the one from the Mozilla repos.

As for (2), I believe that should not happen if you set up apt pinning to prioritize the Mozilla repository (step 5 of their instructions). Can you please double-check that you performed that step?