Firefox as default browser in Fedora

[Christopher Blizzard]

Steven Garrity wrote:

> In the interest of disclosure, I've worked on the Visual Identity team
> responsible for the new Firefox logo (and more stuff to come). I'm not
> making money on it, but I am involved in Firefox.
>
> I would like to see Firefox included as the default web browser on 
> Fedora.
>
> I know the discussion about including Mozilla Firebird has been had
> several times over here on the fedora-devel-list. The general consensus
> I was able to garner from searching the archives seems to be something
> like this:

Internally we're having the firefox vs. epiphany discussion at least for 
Red Hat (which may or may not have anything to do with fedora, it's hard 
to say at this point.)

Anyway, there are a few major stumbling blocks:

o Firefox/phoenix/firebird hasn't reached 1.0, nor has anyone made the 
promises assocated with long term profile stability that come along with it.

o Firefox doesn't have automatic profile migration.  This is a _huge_ 
stumbling block for people coming from the Mozilla world.

o Firefox doesn't look like other apps on the desktop.  That is, it 
doesn't have enough of a native look and feel.  I'm not that worried 
about the layout of pages - which I think is excellent in gecko in 
general - but the UI is odd.  Preferences are different than the HIG and 
just about every other gnome app, button sizes and layout are all wrong, 
menus are wrong, icons are wrong, and it would be a huge amount of work 
to sync all this up.  Plus it's a cost that you have to continue to pay 
over and over again since it's not something that would stay in sync.

This is something that has echos of the old Netscape vs. Mozilla UI 
problems that were so huge a couple of years ago, and was one of the 
main reasons that the old phoenix project was started.  People want 
control over the UI and they don't want to have to deal with people to 
have what they want.  For whatever reason, people won't compromise over 
UI.  So we have flame wars.  And we have forks.  And we go 
round-n-round.  And we're having this discussion again.

Anyway, the point being that the UI for epiphany is basically what we 
want and it's hard to change over to using firefox which is still 
changing a bit over time.

o There's still the huge "what do we do about XUL apps, are they cool 
enough to support or not and can we do it within the scope of epiphany" 
discussion as well.

So this is still an ongoing discussion.

>
>
>
>> “Mozilla is required for other apps”
>
> There didn't seem to be any confirmation of this, but there was
> speculation that some other apps in Fedora may depend on Mozilla 
> libraries.
>
> For example, Karl DeBisschop said of replacing Mozilla with Firefox,
> still called firebird at the time
> (http://redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2003-December/msg00295.html): 
>

There are some external programs that use various bits of Mozilla.  This 
includes, but is probably not limited to, gaim and maybe still 
evolution, which use mozilla-nss for SSL.

--Chris

-- 
------------
Christopher Blizzard
http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/
------------