Firefox etc. default homepage

Bob Relyea rrelyea at redhat.com
Mon May 9 16:09:12 UTC 2005


Arjan van de Ven wrote:

>On Sat, 2005-05-07 at 14:32 +0200, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
>  
>
>>Today we use the release notes as standard homepage for all browsers,
>>instead of whatever is upstream default. Why do we do that, while
>>constantly repeating the mantra "upstream!, upstream!, upstream!"?
>>    
>>
>
>for me the "upstream" mantra applies far more to the code than to any
>actual settings of applications. If the user can and should change
>things, I don't see an issue with Fedora doing so as shipped as well.
>
>  
>
Not only that, but certain settings are designed by the upstream to be 
changed before any redistribution. Fedora as a package ships icons that 
people are required to change because of trademark issues, for instance.

With Firefox, the home page default is one of the most elastic settings 
of a distribution. From the days before Firefox was open source (e.i. 
when it was called Netscape), changing the home page and the throbber 
icon were the 2 most common changes made by other vendors when they 
redistributed the code. It's designed to be changed by the 
redistributor, and in fact almost always is (I know of few people who 
redistribute Firefox or Mozilla that don't change the home page).

So the "upstream!" argument doesn't hold (BTW the Firefox default is not 
Google, either, so you mother would still be lost because she started up 
in the 'download the latest version of Firefox' page). That doesn't mean 
the argument that the current default is silly, ineffective isn't  
valid, and I'm sure that topic can keep this thread going for quite some 
time...;).

bob
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3340 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20050509/e1aa99f4/attachment.bin>


More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list