Snaps are also compatible with other GNU/Linux distributions

Mar 15, 2018 11:20 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has announced recently that the popular Chromium and Mozilla Firefox open-source web browsers are now installable as Snaps on Ubuntu and other Snap-powered operating systems.

Canonical's Snappy technologies are becoming more and more popular these days as the company behind the widely used Ubuntu plans to enable them by default and even make them a first-class citizen in future releases of its Linux-based operating system.

The great thing about Snap apps is that they are secure by design, utilizing a container-style approach mechanism for deploying software on various GNU/Linux distributions that support Canonical's Snappy universal binary format.

Another thing that makes Snaps great is that you are always getting the latest version of an application as soon as it's released upstream.  As such, Canonical tries to convince more and more application developers to port their apps to Snaps for Ubuntu and other distros.

Chromium and Firefox are now available as Snaps, here's how to install them

The latest apps to be ported to the Snap format are the well-known Chromium and Mozilla Firefox web browsers, which can now be installed on Ubuntu and other Snappy-enabled GNU/Linux distributions with a simple command in a Terminal app or directly from the Snappy Store.

Among other popular Linux distros that support Canonical's Snappy technologies, we can mention Arch Linux, Solus, Linux Mint OpenSuSE, Fedora, Debian GNU/Linux, and Gentoo Linux. So if you want to install either Chromium or Firefox as a Snap app, all you have to do is run the commands below.

snap install chromium
snap install firefox
Once the application is installed as a Snap, you'll always get the most recent version as soon as it's released by its developers. Of course, for Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu it doesn't make sense to run the Snap because it's the default web browser and Canonical usually updates it shortly after a new upstream release.