firefox vs epiphany

Mike A. Harris mharris at mharris.ca
Mon Dec 3 04:24:27 UTC 2007


Peter Gordon wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 23:37 +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
>>> Care to enlighten us?
>> No.
>>
>> There is enough documentation available.
> Therein lies your problem. An argument which lacks evidence is
> inherently an incorrect one; and as the source of that argument, the
> burden of proof lies with you and you alone. What feature(s) does
> Epiphany not have which Firefox does?

Not picking any sides here, but I find this "conclusion" kindof funny. 
Epiphany it seems to me from briefly experimenting with it a few times, 
and from watching discussions about it over time - seems to be intended 
on having the look and feel of the GNOME desktop, including the 
minimalistic nature of most GNOME applications.  The "KISS" principle 
seems to be part of the design.

Firefox on the other hand has quite a few features built into it, and 
does not seem to be developed with minimalistic design goals per se.

I honestly don't think someone really needs to prove a statement like 
was given above, simply because anyone can simply run both epiphany and 
firefox side by side, peruse the pulldown menus of both applications, 
and go through the preferences dialogs of both applications on a 
'feature quest' per se. and see everything for themselves very easily. 
I'd be surprised if the mozilla.org website for firefox doesn't list a 
'feature list', and equally surprised if the GNOME website for epiphany 
didn't list a feature list.

So, while I can't give specific proof either way to someone that firefox 
has more features than epiphany, nor vice versa, my understanding is 
that epiphany intends to be a simpler browser than firefox and by 
definition wont have the full rich set of features firefox has.

The burden of proof for such statements doesn't really lay on the person 
making the statements, but rather on who wants to know bad enough to go 
do the research themselves.  ;o)

I just poked around with epiphany a few minutes ago before writing this, 
and found it lacks various features that I would consider "must have" 
for my own personal use, which firefox has, and that's ignoring the 
plethora of existing firefox plugins I use currently.  If I add the 
firefox plugins I use, epiphany becomes much less attractive to me. 
Mind you, in no way am I trying to "prove" anything to anyone else in 
saying so, nor do I feel the need to.  I'm perfectly happy just 
continuing to use that which works best for me, and which meets my own 
needs, and avoiding epiphany, which very much does not meet my needs, 
and I figure the original poster above probably feels the same way. ;o)

Ultimately, which browser should be the default depends on the overall 
goals of the distribution, and should take into account all sorts of 
criteria.  Said "criteria" is going to be coming from very different 
groups of users with very very different goals and requirements.  There 
will never be one solution that is going to please everybody really.

The browser usage statistics freely available over the net more or less 
speak for themselves though IMHO.


-- 
Mike A. Harris

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