I’ve just listened to Late Night Linux Episode 203 (https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-episode-203/), where they interviewed Ken VanDine from Ubuntu who addressed this issue. According to VanDine, its about users expecting stability – so a user doesn’t restart their browser and suddenly getting a new version – which I think is silly because if I didn’t have Firefox running 24/7, I wouldn’t even see a notification: Firefox would just update silently and one day I’d start Firefox to find a different version (which is actually how I’d want it to be).

VanDine did say they are working on improving that experience and they’d like to have a UI where the user can get a notification, press a button, and have their Firefox restart with the new version. If that happens – I’ll switch back, as I think that generally speaking – aside from this “updating running applications” issue – Snaps have a better user experience than Flatpak.