Live Fedora start page proposal

seth vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Tue Aug 28 14:15:38 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 10:07 -0400, Donald Fischer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here's why I think this simple change makes sense:
> 
>  * More useful to users.  The vast majority of the time when Fedora
> users are launching a new browser, they're looking to do something on
> the web, not to read the operating system release notes.  Thus, we've
> proposed to put search front-and-center.

Isn't the search already on the search bar that defaults in firefox?



>  * Fedora-tuned search features.  For example, we can make it easy to
> search for Creative Commons licensed content, a feature that should be
> especially interesting and relevant to Fedora users.  Likewise, we
> could make it easy to search within, or highlight results from,
> certain sites likely to be more relevant to Fedora users (such as
> Fedora documentation, user discussion lists, and community forums).

This sounds good.




> To try this out, there's only one small change required in the
> distribution itself, which is to swap the default URL in the browser
> configuration to http://start.fedoraproject.org.  This switch is a
> time-sensitive issue with respect to Test2, since we'd like to field
> this in at least one and ideally two test releases before deciding to
> release it in a final Fedora version.

I'm not trying to be snide but is there a reason you waited until the
eleventh-hour before test2 went out to ask about this?


>  * Internationalization of the hosted start page and search results
> pages is certainly doable, just as with the local release notes.

doable, but not done?


>  * Red Hat will supply the server infrastructure and bandwidth
> required for this project.

Red Hat will? or will fedora's infrastructure provide it? Who will
control it? What, if any, software is required server-side to facilitate
this?


>  * For users without Internet connectivity, we could do something
> fancy to avoid showing an error message, though that would be more
> than upstream Firefox does.  In fact we have prototyped modifications
> to Firefox to achieve this, but our conclusion was that the additional
> complexity is not justified.  Using a web browser without access to
> the web seems to be a corner case and one in which a warning message
> is appropriate!  In the offline case, local release notes would still
> be available from the default bookmarks toolbar.  Tuning offline
> behavior is an area that we could look at further in conjunction with
> the community.

It's not just w/o internet access. It is with limited/controlled
internet access, too. Remember, it's not just the possibility of the
page not loading, it's the possibility of the whole thing stalling out
waiting 2 minutes or more for a dns resolution that ISN'T going to come.


-sv





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