Should Firefox stay the default browser in Fedora Workstation?

[Elad Alfassa]

To sum up this thread:

The general consensus on this list is that Firefox will stay the default
browser.

To address the issues that were raised:

GPU Acceleration: in the works, not stable enough yet, but I'm happy to see
Mozilla is working on improving this for Linux. In addition to make the
browser faster, it will also make it grind less CPU time and, as reported
here, save battery - and longer battery time on laptops is always
appreciated.

Geolocation:  Upstream's bugzilla have obsolete patches to make Firefox use
Geoclue2, but nobody wants/has the time/is working on getting them fixed
and merged.
As a workaround until those patches get merged (if ever) we can use the
Mozilla Location Services instead of Google's location services, see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1063739

Desktop Notifications: Not addressed in this thread. Upstream has a bug
about this with discussion and implementation notes, but no patches. see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858919

URL Scheme handler support: Not addressed in this thread. We want irc://,
magnet:// and such links to work if the user has an app installed for them.
Right now they don't. This also prevents us from adding a software:// URL
scheme to make linking to apps in GNOME Software possible. Downstream bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1105640

UI that matches the rest of the desktop:
We can't do anything about this. To ship the theme by default, we need
permission from Mozilla, and we need to be able to promise that the theme
will remain supported and that Firefox updates won't break it, degrading
the user's experience to the default theme. We also need a way for the
theme to be loaded by default - simply installing it is not enough. This
will require patching Firefox. Patching, packaging and getting permission
from Mozilla is not impossible, but it seems that giving the promise that
the theme will remain supported for the forseeable future is impossible in
the current state of things.
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=867020 and this mailing
list thread from August 2012:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2012-August/007612.html
Note that the Firefox GTK3 port doesn't affect this point, because even
Firefox with the GTK3 patches still looks exactly like GTK2 Firefox.

GTK3 Support: Still in the works, not stable enough at the moment. No ETA
either from what I can see.

High-DPI Support: According to certain people this issue should be "not too
hard" to fix, but unless someone is going to write patches, it's not going
to happen

Proper touch input support: Won't be possible before the GTK3 port is
complete. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711711 and
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978679


-- 
-Elad Alfassa.
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