Firefox as default browser in Fedora

Steven Garrity stevelist at silverorange.com
Thu Feb 12 03:14:33 UTC 2004


Warren Togami wrote:
> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=50876
> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=366523#366523
> On the topic of the Firefox logo, this is some seemingly unhappy news. 
> The logo however is unrelated to your question.
I wouldn't worry too much about this. We're still working on it.

> https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=1272
> The first hurdle will be eventual official inclusion into Fedora.  The
> first step in reaching that goal would be to make the Firefox 0.8
> submitted package at fedora.us of the highest quality now.  Could you
> serve as an active liason with upstream developers in order to help this
> process?
Agreed - I've been keeping an eye on the package progress so far. I 
would be glad to help any way I can, including acting as a liaison with 
the upstream developers. I'm in touch with the Firefox developers in the 
context of the visual identity work, but I am not a developer myself. 
That said, I do feel I can get the right information to the right people.


> Blizzard mentioned that the lack of automatic importing is a blocker for
> inclusion of both Firebird and Thunderbird.
I certainly agree that with a mail application, smooth profile migration 
is key. However, with a web-browser, the profile is much less 
significant. I'm not necessarily advocating the inclusion of Thunderbird 
- especially with the great work being done with Evolution. So, as you 
pointed out, making sure that Firefox can play nice with Mozilla Mail is 
important, which leads us to...


> I personally see the current poor situation of xremote clashes, broken
> xremote functions (while Thunderbird is running), and poor dekstop
> integration (actually launching the right user-chosen Preferred
> Application) globally as hurdles.  I personally use a bunch of ugly hacks
> in my personal FC desktop in order to make all the applications work
> together.
> 
> The xremote problems make it extremely problematic to use Firefox, while
> keeping the regular Mozilla suite as the mail client.  Some users really
> want to keep it this way.  The lack of automatic importing makes it
> difficult to quickly switch to the Firefox/Thunderbird combo.  That combo
> does work well with ugly script hacks that avoid the broken xremote
> functions.
I completely agree. I had to get a script to launch Firefox too. It 
works fine once a decent launch script is in place, but I agree that 
this needs to be improved. That said, this is something that could 
potentially be patched band-aid solutions in the Fedora package while 
the core issues are worked out.

Is there anyone who has knowledge to help me talk to the Firefox 
developers about the xremote problems, or better yet, someone who can 
help the Firefox developers fix the problems? Please let me know.


> gaim and other GPL applications that need SSL capability are unable to use
> OpenSSL due to GPL incompatibility.  As a result gaim has the option of
> linking against mozilla-nss or gnutls.  gnutls is not shipped in the
> distribution (something about code quality?), so gaim currently needs
> mozilla-nss.  I think fedora.us ships something that uses mozilla-nss too,
> but I cannot remember off the top of my head.  I suppose it may be
> possible to link gaim to Firefox, but I don't know if anyone has tried.
I'm not sure about this - can anyone clarify?

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Warren,
Steven Garrity





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