Should Firefox stay the default browser in Fedora Workstation?

Fri Jun 6 16:31:38 UTC 2014

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On 06/06/2014 12:20 PM, Elad Alfassa wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Christian Schaller
> <cschalle at redhat.com <mailto:cschalle at redhat.com>> wrote:
> 
> Hi Elad, Some of the issues you mention we actually have people in
> the desktop team at Red Hat working on, like the GTK3 port.
> 
> In general I am tempted to keep Firefox as our primary browser for
> a variety of reasons like brand recognition, security updates and
> web site support. So while I am positive to the effort the Web team
> are undertaking I am having a hard time convincing myself they
> would be a better choice for us despite the integration advantage
> they bring.
> 
> Christian
> 
> 
> I'm well aware of the efforts going on to port firefox to GTK3. 
> Nevertheless, this port won't get us much, because Firefox will
> still look alien to the rest of the desktop (which is something
> upstream is unwilling to change, and Fedora people objected to
> including the "Firefox GNOME" theme by default).
> 

Is there any reason that this cannot be packaged separately from the
'firefox' SRPM and included as part of Fedora Workstation? I don't
think it's an unreasonable thing for the Workstation WG to decide
should be default on that Product.

> Even after the GTK3 port is done, High-DPI and touch input support
> won't be supported (at least, not anytime soon). How can we
> advertise high-dpi and touch input support as features of our
> product if our default web browser, arguably the most important app
> for most users, doesn't support them?
> 

Ship with Epiphany as well as Firefox? Then we can have useful UI in
the gnome-initial-setup perhaps that asks if you're using a
touchscreen or detects hi-dpi and then advises you to change the
default browser to Epiphany.

> 
> I wanted to raise a couple of more points about how upstream
> treats Linux, but I'd rather stick with constructive criticism
> here.
> 

Thank you, that's always preferable.