20.04 - Chromium snap extremely slow to start

**hlinden** · July 23rd, 2020

Chromium snap is starting extremely slow for me. See the timestamps in the upper right corner. From starting the process to a usable instance it takes over 1.25 minutes. Does anybody else experience this problem and is there a solution for it?

chromium1.jpg chromium2.jpg chromium3.jpg chromium4.jpg chromium5.png.jpg

**deadflowr** · July 23rd, 2020

Par for the course.
All snaps are slow for first launch.

How is it for subsequent launches after that?
Or does it always launch slow regardless of how many times you try.

**hlinden** · July 23rd, 2020

After that it's okay, it takes a few seconds until the next reboot, then it's the same long wait. Still, this is not really usable. If I have an appointment in the morning and I need Chromium because it works better with Jitsi, I don't really want to wait one and a half minutes for my browser to launch. This isn't really a slow machine either, it's a Ryzen with 32GB RAM and an NVMe SSD. Is there any solution for this?

**ajgreeny** · July 23rd, 2020

I believe all snaps are slow to start compared to the applications installed using the standard .deb packages but I am not aware of any way to speed them up if you stick with the snap version.

Some applications/packages are available as both .deb and snap, so for some you can make that choice in the software-store application, whatever that is now called; I don't use it and removed it from my system, using synaptic if I want a GUI.

Synaptic does not normally offer snap packages, but if you choose chromium in synaptic it does install the snap version, the only snap it does add as far as I'm aware.

However, there are two worthwhile PPA repos for chromium that you can use instead, as I do, choosing the first one below for the dev version, currently 85.0.4173.0 (Developer Build) Ubuntu 20.04 (64-bit) . The instructions for using it are shown if you go to the links shown but be aware that some users believe they are, or could be, a security risk. I've been using the PPA version since installing Focal when it was released and had no difficulties. I have to admit that firefox is always my browser of choice and I seldom use chromium so may not be fully aware of problems that other PPA users have seen
https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+...u/chromium-dev
or
https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+.../chromium-beta

**deadflowr** · July 23rd, 2020

How important is chromium for you?
Is Google Chrome an option?

Or any of the other chromium based browsers like vivaldi or brave?

**hlinden** · July 24th, 2020

Thank you everybody for your replies. Chrome would probably be an alternative, but I think I'll be going with the chromium-beta ppa that @ajgreeny has mentioned.

Pity. I get the idea behind snap, but these longs waits during the first startup are just a bad user experience.

**maglin2** · July 24th, 2020

I'm using Chromium snap (Version 84.0.4147.89 (Official Build) snap (64-bit)) on a 10 year old Acer Aspire Laptop with 4GB RAM and an Intel Pentium T4400 dual core processor. First launch after reboot takes about 15 seconds. Thereafter it's virtually instant. I can't tell you what's typical, but 1.25 minutes for a machine with your spec sounds very disappointing.

**ajgreeny** · July 25th, 2020

The biggest annoyance I have with chromium snap version is the inability to download things such as bank statements, power supplier invoices, and many other files that I regularly download into their own specific folders; you can only download them into Downloads, not even into sub folders of that.

Using firefox the system remembers where I downloaded files to, depending on the URL they are from, so bank statements go automatically to the folder I want, not into Downloads from where I have to move them.

Grrrrr!

**maglin2** · July 25th, 2020

I don't find that - I can download into any subfolder of my Documents folder. Odd.
That is one reason I use snap as opposed to firejail for confinement - by default it behaves exactly as you describe for snap.

**ajgreeny** · July 25th, 2020

Originally Posted by maglin2

I don't find that - I can download into any subfolder of my Documents folder. Odd.
That is one reason I use snap as opposed to firejail for confinement - by default it behaves exactly as you describe for snap.

Interesting!
Have things changed or did I miss something in the configuration of the snap? That's very likely as I simply installed it and started using it with the same config folder as I used in 18.04.

Either way I don't think I shall move to the snap version as the PPA version works superbly.