As a Lubuntu Council member I would like to address a few things above.
The question is, how important is “snap” to Lubuntu and/or the genral Ubuntu operating system?? They seem to be diving into it with enthusiasm
@guiverc addressed what the snap packaging system is but I would like to address the “how important” part of this from a Lubuntu standpoint. The system and configuration we ship is what we feel comfortable to support either directly or with upstream Ubuntu help. One of the great things about Ubuntu (and Linux/open source based things) is there is a great deal of choice in what you can do with it after. There is complete control to do what you want. We (the Lubuntu Team) are far too small to account for every variable which is why our team needs to stick to supporting what we offer out of the box. It isn’t that we won’t try to help you should you choose to go your own path but we only have a limited amount of time and knowledge so in some regards you are on your own.
All of that being said, the decision to switch to the Firefox snap was not necessarily the Lubuntu Team’s preference, this is the first snap we have shipped by default. As I previously mentioned we are a small team and can not support our own browser, thus we look to our upstream offerings. We could have chosen Falkon, as that is still in the Ubuntu repositories and is now seeing some regular releases from the upstream developers. I would actually suggest that as a possible alternative or secondary browser option. It does have limitations though, extension support is one of the areas. In addition, DRM online video is another area. If those things don’t matter too much to you, it is a great choice. Ultimately we went with Firefox as a snap because we feel it offers the most functionality and will give (generally speaking) the most complete browser experience.
Snap Firefox takes 15 seconds to launch? Its annoying, since I have an nvme SSD.
It is true that the first time Firefox is loaded in your current session it takes more time and it is annoying. That being said, it only happens on first load, after that it takes the same time as the other package formats. I (and this is me speaking, not the council) find it a strange thing to get hung up on since it is a one time thing.
I’ve noticed that my Lubuntu install boots more slowly than my SUSE and Debian and Manjaro installs
I will reiterate here that this is not Firefox nor the snap backend causing this. There could be a number of possible explanations but we should probably split this off into a separate thread so that it doesn’t get confused with this topic if you felt the need to explore it further.
though did say many will be corrected post-release date for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
And here is one of the biggest benefits of snap packaging, the updates. Updates happen in the background without having to think about it. They are able to deliver all of the necessary libraries and dependencies alongside without impacting other packages too.
certain extensions like keypass and video download helper don’t work
Honestly this limitation is another benefit because it means that malicious extensions can’t get added too. Security confinement in a web browser is a direction that things need to go. Most bad stuff comes from the Internet and in general, the browser is the vehicle to deliver it. While not convenient, it is more secure. I’ll take security over convenience any day. As pointed out earlier by @KGIII extensions do work on the snap. I have Ublock and Bitwarden installed, both work as they do/did on the native package.