Ubuntu has been looking for ways to differentiate themselves (and arguably lock users in) for many years and Snap is their latest go at it. Consider that Debian (i.e. Ubuntu's upstream) has been providing Firefox .debs for a very long time, so it takes effort not to offer .debs for it on a Debian derivative.

Debian providing Firefox debs for a long time? I think you are very wrong because Firefox is not even called this way in Debian, it's IceWeasel.

Your information is outdated. It hasn't been called IceWeasel for a while now and that only had to do with a trademark issue[1] but it was still based on the Firefox sources. Source: running Firefox via .deb (firefox-esr in the Debian repo) on Debian stable to write this.

[1] IIRC, it had to do with using the Firefox name even though Debian was lightly modifying sources to remove a couple of things. This was resolved a while ago and the Firefox branding resumed.

Last time I tried Debian they only provided packages for the current ESR release - Canonical wants to provide the latest stable release.

Mozilla doesn't directly offer a .deb file. They offer precompiled binary tarballs for Linux. Mozilla doesn't make distribution specific packages as far as I am aware and it was Canonical that was packaging it for all of their supported distributions. It's less work for Canonical now to package Firefox, and Mozilla has more control over pushing updates so it's mutually beneficial for them.

Isn't https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa managed by Mozilla? They have the name and the logo.

No, it is not managed by Mozilla. It's a separate, independent group of people - and for this reason you should not use this PPA.

Does ubuntu actually package it. Don't they just re-use debians work like 99% of their distro?

Not that many projects offer native .debs.

Most of that work is done by package maintainers that have an interest in the project and package the update for each release.

The projects that usually do make their own debs/rpms/whatever are usually backed by companies that have a strong interest in making their software easy to access. I guess mozilla should be in that group but they aren't.

MS releases full versions of code, Google Releases Chrome, you can get a terraform deb you can get neovim. Not really sure why FF doesn't release one but the way I understand it, FF is kinda back burner for Mozilla so who knows.

Someone on the Mozilla team seems to distribute DEB files: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Lots of projects seem to producing DEB files. I think they're the most common shared distribution format except for maybe PKGBUILD files for Arch.

Loads of projects have their own package repositories but cross distro distributions like Flatpak and Snap tend to be recommended before the docs refer to the repositories. The extra two or three clicks necessary to get the repository URL seem to make a big difference in popularity.

"Mozilla-team" is not actually Mozilla.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1523551

> Matthias Versen [:Matti]

> Again, there was never a PPA by Mozilla but rather by the unofficial Mozilla-team and the Mozilla-Team is not Mozilla.

> They are AFAIK a group of people from the Ubuntu community who maintain and provide the Builds for Mozilla.org products for Ubuntu users.

> You have to ask at Ubuntu or ask directly the Members of the Ubuntu Mozilla-Team about the status of those builds and who generates them.

This.

If Mozilla was so keen on snaps of their own accord why wouldn’t they be pushing other distros to also pack it up as a snap and/or Flatpak.

Because other distros have different ideological reasons for packaging Firefox their way than Canonical. Fedora, for example, applies patches to Firefox before distributing their rpm.

Ding ding!