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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.

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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Your information is outdated.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.

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