Chromium provides a few ways to pre-load bookmarks, extensions, and other settings on a brand new profile. One of those is the master_preferences file.
On Linux, this file is usually placed at /etc/chromium/master_preferences or /usr/lib/chromium/master_preferences and read when launching chromium with no existing profile (e.g. chromium-browser --user-data-dir=~/new_profile). This worked once upon a time (using the .deb install of chromium afaik), but I cannot get it to work now.
I have a feeling this is due to the new Snap container having its own sandboxed filesystem and, being a read-only filesystem, I can't simply drop this preferences file into the container. Has Ubuntu's snap chromium been configured to read the master_preferences from elsewhere? Is there some other way to get this preferences file working?
Here's a sample master_preferences that should set Google as the homepage and add a "Home" button to the UI.
{ "homepage": "", "homepage_is_newtabpage": false
}
