Should Firefox stay the default browser in Fedora Workstation?

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2014-06-06 at 18:52 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
> Meanwhile, Epiphany (GNOME Web) keeps getting better and better,
> perhaps we should consider it as the default?

As a full-time Epiphany user, I'm confident in saying that Firefox
should remain the default browser in Fedora 21. Let me preface this with
a defense of Epiphany:

Epiphany's desktop integration is dramatically better than Firefox's,
and I believe it is very important to plan for it to eventually replace
Firefox as the default browser in Fedora Workstation. Firefox's
developers have shown no interest in attempting to conform to the GNOME
HIG, and the newest version of Epiphany is very good at doing so (with
the sole exception of the bookmarks dialog, which will need to be
rewritten in the future). I think brand recognition is not an
appropriate metric by which to choose the default browser. I also think
extensibility is not an important metric. Epiphany is intentionally as
simple as possible, and users who rely on particular Firefox extensions
should feel welcome to install Firefox. (Firefox should certainly be
featured in GNOME Software if it were not to be the default.)

I've found that website compatibility issues exist, but they are rare
and not significant enough to disqualify it from becoming our default. A
notable exception would be YouTube, which is completely broken in
Epiphany lacking the H.264 codec from rpmfusion (which shouldn't be
necessary as YouTube has WebM videos). This would need to be fixed.

But I think Epiphany is not yet ready to replace Firefox, and will
likely be received negatively by users if this were to happen now. To
name just a few issues with the latest version: there are serious
unresolved TLS security issues, the adblocker blocks all sorts of legit
images and styling, opening History hangs the browser, it loads HTTPS
pages that fail certificate validation with no warning (and sometimes
spuriously fails pages that ought to validate), and it reports Mac OS X
in the user agent, tricking sites into displaying Mac-specific downloads
and information.

The version of Epiphany in Fedora 20 crashes almost every single time it
is closed, and often when you try to open hyperlinks from a different
program. This has been fixed upstream for a while, but it's an
indication that nobody is maintaining it in Fedora.

I instead recommend packaging GNOME integration Firefox extensions and
installing them by default. They are not as good as Epiphany and never
will be, but it's better than nothing.

Michael
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