On 01/11/2016 07:00 AM, Kalev Lember wrote:
On 01/10/2016 11:29 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Thu, 2016-01-07 at 14:26 +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Hi, there is currently a case against Firefox discussed in FESCo: https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1518
We have many different opinions in this thread. Clearly, there is no solution that will make everyone happy. I tried to formulate a consensus position based on the comments in this thread, which I suspect the majority of us can support:
"Fedora Workstation prefers to ship the latest release of Firefox, not ESR releases. Shipping an unbranded version of Firefox is acceptable to us, but not ideal. Shipping a version of Firefox that blocks unsigned extensions is also acceptable to us, but not ideal."
In other words: we're fine with FESCo deciding for either unbranded or locked-down Firefox, but we won't be very happy either way. Does this seem fair?
My personal take on this is that we need to ship with a mainstream browser that is actively developed and that web sites support. These days, I think it's a choice between either Firefox or Chrome.
We don't have Chrome in Fedora so this leaves Firefox.
Also, shipping a browser with a widely recognizable name (Firefox) as opposed to shipping a minor fork (Icecat) has a huge benefit when it comes to people finding the web browser -- they will have used the same browser on other operating systems, making switching to Fedora easier.
Habit plays a huge role. Take a familiar name away and it's suddenly much harder for us to compete.
I think it would be fine to ask Firefox upstream to support additional trust chains to support locally packaged extensions, but if that fails I don't think we should go with anything as drastic as switching to an unbranded Firefox fork.
"I'll also add that the accessibility of those firefox forks is sometimes not as good as and sometimes much worse than firefox itself. This isn't always the case, but with icecat 24 for example, there were lots of little things, orca not being able to track the focus, controlls not being focusable, and when I brought them up to joanmeri I was told quite bruskly to "just use firefox". I don't like chrome or chromium, and my main reason for that is as I've said, google not talking to the assistive technology API's available on whichever platform it's running on, instead expecting you to download their own addon which somehow turns their internal representations of webpages into spoken text, using their own tts voices, instead of the system ones. In other words, I'm for sticking with firefox, but I will keep going if we switch to a fork, I'll just have more bugs to file. Thanks Kendell clark"