Ubuntu – Why can’t Chromium suddenly access any partition except for /home

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 19.10 and to my horror I discovered that the default browser Chromium can no longer access other partitions than /home.

This means that my partitions containing music and videos (/multimedia) for instance are no longer accessible e.g. to upload into Google Drive. This includes USB partitions.

I found another description of this phenomenon here: https://fosspost.org/reviews/distributions/ubuntu-19-10-review where it says

"Also, while we acknowledge that most users will only need to access their home folders, it’s worthy to mention that you no longer can access system files & folders from inside Chromium (You can’t access anything except your home folder). This means that if you are to upload a file or an image for example into the Internet using an uploading website, then this file/image must be in your home folder, as you can not access directories such as /usr, /etc or other directories located in your root partition. In fact, you no longer can access any other partition at all, this includes USB sticks and other booted partitions:"

I wonder why this behaviour been introduced? it violates the whole idea of multiple disks, partitions and symlinks. Btw, this still works for Firefox.

My questions are

• Are there any plans to fix this?
• I expect one reason for this behaviour is about security. If so, is it possible to explain why and how that makes for better security? The files on other partitions are legitimately accessible by the user anyway e.g. through symlinks. But with this change, I'll have to move them to /home before uploading so still accessing them although more slowly and cumbersome.
• If this behaviour is now permanent, the question is how should we incorporate multiple disks in our filesystem?
• Alternatively, can someone tell me how to find and install the debian package. I haven't been able to locate it?

This is not a duplicate of What is the classic mode of snap, and why do some snaps not install without it (e.g. MS Visual Studio)? because that is about a specific error during installation that I didn't get. My question is about the access chromium has in Ubuntu 19.10.

Anyway, I solved the problem via the following command by using the original debian package from Google:

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

After that I can now access my other partitions again.
I know this is hacky in the sense that the package isn't native to Ubuntu so I would really like to get some advice on how to incorporate multiple disks and partitions with this new restricted behaviour of Chromium.

Thank you very much