Chromium in Ubuntu – deb to snap transition

Chromium is a very popular web browser, the fully open source counterpart to Google Chrome. On Ubuntu, Chromium is not the default browser, and the package resides in the ‘universe’ section of the archive. Universe contains community-maintained software packages. Despite that, the Ubuntu Desktop Team is committed to packaging and maintaining Chromium because a significant number of users rely on it.
Maintaining a single release of Chromium is a significant time investment for the Ubuntu Desktop Team working with the Ubuntu Security team to deliver updates to each stable release. As the teams support numerous stable releases of Ubuntu, the amount of work is compounded.
Comparing this workload to other Linux distributions which have a single supported rolling release misses the nuance of supporting multiple Long Term Support (LTS) and non-LTS releases.
Google releases a new major version of Chromium every six weeks, with typically several minor versions to address security vulnerabilities in between. Every new stable version has to be built for each supported Ubuntu release − 16.04, 18.04, 19.04 and the upcoming 19.10 − and for all supported architectures (amd64, i386, armhf, arm64).
Additionally, ensuring Chromium even builds (let alone runs) on older releases such as 16.04 can be challenging, as the upstream project often uses new compiler features that are not available on older releases.
In contrast, a snap needs to be built only once per architecture, and will run on all systems that support snapd. This covers all supported Ubuntu releases including 14.04 with Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), as well as other distributions like Debian, Fedora, Mint, and Manjaro.
Also: [Older] Packaging Domoticz for Debian, Ubuntu, Raspbian and Fedora
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