Morphit

Canonical added an epoch prefix to the firefox version number. Because that epoch (1) is higher than the implicit default (0), the official ubuntu dummy package is always considered to be a higher version than the official Mozilla package. apt doesn’t look at snap packages, it installs the deb, but the ubuntu deb just runs snap install firefox and basically nothing else.

Well, yes, except Canonical have made them actually do the same thing in the case of Firefox. I’m not aware of any other packages that have the deb install just run the snap install.

So both commands do the same thing… right? I’m not saying snap and apt are the same.

In Ubuntu they are the same. firefox version 1:1snap1-0ubuntu5 is a deb that literally runs the command snap install firefox in the preinst script. Check line 77 in firefox-1snap1/debian/firefox.preinst in the source tarball: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/1:1snap1-0ubuntu5

There’s no magic there.