Zorin seems to want either snap / firefox / or chromium installed.
Firefox removal will prompt to install chromium and snap if it doesn't already exist:
sudo apt remove firefox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
xul-ext-ubufox
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following additional packages will be installed:
chromium-browser snapd
The following packages will be REMOVED:
firefox
The following NEW packages will be installed:
chromium-browser snapd
And the wheel goes around if I try to uninstall snap / chromium:
sudo apt remove --purge snapd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
firefox
The following packages will be REMOVED:
chromium-browser* snapd*
The following NEW packages will be installed:
firefox
How do I remove them without apt trying to install an alternate?
As I understand, removing the default applications (nautilus, thunar, etc) can cause problems with the system. If so, it would apply to Firefox too. Why uninstall Firefox instead of just installing an alternative and using that?
Snaps themselves should not be impacted by any apt changes.
I have not tried to remove Firefox yet because I wasn't sure if it would mess anything else up since it came already installed. But I understand wanting to remove it. I use Brave instead of Firefox but I am continually getting updates for Firefox for all the different language packs that come with Firefox. If you have a slow internet connection it takes several minutes to download all those updates for a program I don't even use. So I also would like to uninstall Firefox but I leave it alone because I don't want to mess up my OS. If someone can come up with a way to uninstall Firefox safely I will uninstall it.
Trying to remove apps which I will not use, so as not to bloat my system needlessly. I use ungoogled chromium, not sure why Firefox would be required to be tied into the system itself. Removing Firefox frees up 391MB of data, which is significant space saving to me.
In synaptic, search for Firefox, then right click and select remove for each of the language packs you do not need. Click Apply. You will stop getting any future updates for them.
Try using Synaptic, as I recommended for citfta. Select all Firefox packages -> right click -> completely remove -> Apply.
You may want to wait and see if anyone else chimes-in as to whether a complete removal may break your system.
I just checked Synaptic to see about uninstalling the language packs and found that FireFox is not installed on my Cinnamon DE ..... I know when I installed Vivaldi I did uninstalled Firefox but I'm not sure how I did it either by Synaptic or the terminal .... anyway I have't experienced any problems while running Cinnamon DE on 16 Pro after uninstalling it .....
Just a note of caution your experience of removing FireFox maybe be different than mine .... so do so at your own risk ....
It looks like Firefox (or another repo'd browser) is required for gnome-core, so this issue doesn't look related to Zorin at all, I came from a Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop, so I did not recognize this issue until now.
Yes, Firefox is integrated into Mint, as well. It bothers me a great deal. It seems like the user would have the choice, given Browser availability...
On my copy installed of Zorin OS Lite, I can remove Firefox without it trying to replace it with a Snapd supplied browser since I set another browser as default on my system. Even so, it still wants to remove Zorin-os-feedback app as a dependency:
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
zorin-os-feedback
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
firefox