From: "Kalev Lember" <kalevlember(a)gmail.com>
To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop"
<desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2016 8:00:12 AM
Subject: Re: Case against Firefox in FESCo
On 01/10/2016 11:29 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Thu, 2016-01-07 at 14:26 +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
>> Hi,
>> there is currently a case against Firefox discussed in FESCo:
>>
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1518
>
> We have many different opinions in this thread. Clearly, there is no
> solution that will make everyone happy. I tried to formulate a
> consensus position based on the comments in this thread, which I
> suspect the majority of us can support:
>
> "Fedora Workstation prefers to ship the latest release of Firefox, not
> ESR releases. Shipping an unbranded version of Firefox is acceptable to
> us, but not ideal. Shipping a version of Firefox that blocks unsigned
> extensions is also acceptable to us, but not ideal."
>
> In other words: we're fine with FESCo deciding for either unbranded or
> locked-down Firefox, but we won't be very happy either way. Does this
> seem fair?
My personal take on this is that we need to ship with a mainstream
browser that is actively developed and that web sites support. These
days, I think it's a choice between either Firefox or Chrome.
We don't have Chrome in Fedora so this leaves Firefox.
Also, shipping a browser with a widely recognizable name (Firefox) as
opposed to shipping a minor fork (Icecat) has a huge benefit when it
comes to people finding the web browser -- they will have used the same
browser on other operating systems, making switching to Fedora easier.
Habit plays a huge role. Take a familiar name away and it's suddenly
much harder for us to compete.
I think it would be fine to ask Firefox upstream to support additional
trust chains to support locally packaged extensions, but if that fails I
don't think we should go with anything as drastic as switching to an
unbranded Firefox fork.
I agree with this; yes, lets work with upstream to try to resolve this
and leave any thoughts on drastic action behind for now, even if that
means we ship a Firefox which only supports signed extensions either
temporary or permanently. Our browser team is overworked as it is, we
don't need to add to the burden.
Christian