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Comment by NicolaiS | Hacker News Reader

A note for Ubuntu users; if Firefox is installed using `snap` (default) and you run `snap refresh` it will output "All snaps up to date" - but this is not true! You have to close firefox, then run `snap refresh` for snap to upgrade firefox...

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Not an Ubunutu or snap user but curious, why?

The snap store also complains regularly that it can't updte the snap store because the snap store is running. It is just terrible software overall.

Neither am I, but seems that snap refreshes can be inhibited programmatically if they may cause some damage when proceeded in the background. So it is technically correct that no snap refreshes can be performed at this point, but the message doesn't clearly state that some refreshes have been inhibited (possibly because there would be tons of them if they are exhaustively listed?).

It doesn't update actively running application containers.

You don't actually need to stop it before running “snap refresh” though, it'll just be out of date as long as it is kept open. Once the application stops running, next time it is run the updated image will be used.

[caveat: I'm not a snap user myself currently, so my information may be inaccurate, take with a pinch of your favourite condiment]

Interesting. On Arch, Firefox just refuses to keep working after I've updated and requests me to restart it.

Now, I don't know how your setup looks like, but I don't think anything is distributed as snaps by default on Arch. At least AFAIK its mostly an Ubuntu & derivatives thing.

That is Firefox standalone behavior when it detects its files have been changed and differ from the ones loaded by the current instance. In theory, what snap is doing avoid changing files from a program while it is running.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, it was more broken in more interesting ways before they implemented the forced restart

Yeah, I remember. That was fun. haha

ugh thanks, I just thought that the snap release hadn't been cut yet, lol. pretty dumb UI decision

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