What use to be the PPA that allowed Ubuntu users to use native .deb packages for Firefox has recently changed to the same meta package that forces installation of Snap and the Firefox snap package.
I am having to remove the meta package, then re-uninstall the snap firefox, then re-uninstall Snap, then install pin the latest build I could get (firefox_116.0.3+build2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1~mt1_arm64.deb) to keep the native firefox build.
I’m so done with Ubuntu.
There’s a simple reason why Mozilla/canonical does this and that is security fixes. Due to the difference in support cycles of Firefox and Ubuntu LTS versions fixes would have to be manually backported to the system Firefox version and newer versions won’t run due to library dependencies. Snap solves all of that.
Don’t get me wrong though, snap is still terrible, but other than flatpak or doing the work of backporting it’s the only option to get security fixes to Ubuntu
Previous to the switch to snaps, Ubuntu was providing the latest version of Firefox built for each supported Ubuntu release. I’m sure this was more work, but the older system library version issue was not a blocker.
Edit: in fact, Mozilla still provides an apt repo with Firefox deb packages built for each supported Ubuntu release.
But around the same time mozilla shortened the support cycles for their lts releases
Mozilla seem to be able to limit library dependencies in their builds: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/system-requirements/
But are they actually doing this? I am not seeing any changes: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa still has the .deb packages