Let's reconsider some more applications installed by default

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, 2015-08-29 at 17:12 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> If it weren't for the developer emphasis of Workstation, I'd be a
> little more ambivalent about Web by default. And also what's the
> future of WebKit2 with Web? It seems like Blink is more relevant
> going
> forward.

Well it depends on what you want to do. If you're a user and want a web
browser, pick whichever you like. I say use Epiphany for the GNOME
integration, or Chromium for the great security. I don't really see
much advantage to Firefox sans the GNOME 3 theme, other than that
Mozilla is a much nicer upstream than Google, but it's a good choice
too. The argument for Firefox becomes much stronger if you take
Chromium out of the picture; say, because it's banned in Fedora, or
because you'd have to remove all the ffmpeg support to get it past the
RH lawyers, and be left with no video support. ;) So for the question
of what makes a good default browser, Chromium is not really an option.
Unless gstreamer support gets merged upstream (which might actually
happen, but I wouldn't hold your breath, because I hear Google is
hostile to it), or we carry that patchset in Fedora (also a valid
option). You also have to get it past the FPC. I will stay out of the
politics of this :) but the odds seem slim to me.

Now, if you want to build an application, you want WebKit, because
WebKit has a great API. Nobody is ever going to use Blink directly to
build a browser; the API is too low-level. They will either use
Chromium, which has a higher-level API, or maybe CEF, even higher
level. But WebKit wins here hands-down, unless you place a very high
weight on new HTML 5 features that few sites use. Now, if you want to
build a GTK+ or Qt application, then what's interesting to you are
WebKitGTK+, and possibly in the future QtWebEngine, as it matures and
if the Qt folks can manage to get an exception from FPC for bundling
Chromium (tbh, I am not expecting this to happen). You would be pretty
crazy to consider anything else. If other GTK+ or Qt wrappers for
Chromium come into existence in the future, those would also be
interesting for Fedora. I don't see any room for another GTK+ browser
engine (it would take many years to get one up to the quality of
WebKitGTK+), but QtWebEngine is new and vulnerable due to bundling (it
has little chance of appearing in Debian or Fedora anytime soon) and
LGPLv3+ (many companies want nothing to do with the 3).

Anyway, your high-level comparison is that Chromium indeed has newer
HTML 5 features than WebKit, and also faster graphics processing, and
is lol way more secure than either Firefox or WebKit (probably the most
important criterion, tbh), but Chromium has higher memory requirements,
and it's banned from Fedora. ;) What matters by far the most to app
developers, though, is API, and WebKit wins there with no signs of that
changing, which is why WebKit isn't going anywhere. But for the
discussion of what browser to use by default, that doesn't matter one
bit!

Michael