Guilherme Luciano Marques wrote:
> I think that the deduplication is a good idea, but, in my opinion, Firefox
> should be the default choice.
Please no! Can we finally stop that nonsense? The main reasons why Firefox
is not a good fit for the KDE Plasma Spin from the old discussion are still
valid (I slightly updated the list where needed):
* We do not control the packaging of Firefox. It is not even open to
provenpackager! We are completely at the mercy of the Firefox maintainers.
* In particular, the Fedora Firefox package will most likely NOT include the
KDE integration developed by openSUSE, ever. That means the package will
integrate extremely poorly into our Plasma setup (e.g., no KDE file
dialogs).
* Firefox also does not pick up native icons, not even GTK+/GNOME ones.
* Firefox also has unwanted GNOME dependencies such as
(lib)startup-notification.
* Shipping Firefox means we have to ship another HTML engine just for
Firefox! Firefox takes a lot more space on the live image than a browser
that reuses Qt/KDE components.
* Users who absolutely want Firefox can simply install it from the
repository. Or they could use one of the several spins that default to
Firefox.
* I don't buy the argument that there is "no alternative" to Firefox. There
are perfectly fine Qt/KDE alternatives, that just work on almost all
websites out there. (And even Firefox doesn't work on 100% of the web.)
QtWebEngine even has a higher website compatibility rate (by being based
on Chromium) than Firefox. The KDE SIG plan has always been to prefer
Qt/KDE applications wherever possible. Here, it is clearly possible.
Shipping non-Qt/KDE applications is acceptable if those are specialized
applications with no KDE alternative (think, e.g., Blender). A browser is
not specialized, it's a core part of the desktop. And the Qt/KDE
alternatives exist and work.
* Firefox also has some "features" that are worrisome for Fedora as a whole:
- The anti-malware and anti-phishing protection (enabled by default!)
sends a hash of every URL you visit to Google (yes, Google!).
- Firefox Health Report sends some additional data to Mozilla. It is also
enabled by default!
- For some time, Mozilla also showed client-side advertisements on some
pages generated by it. I believe it stopped doing that, at least, but
who says it won't come back?
- Speaking of ads on the web, both Konqueror and QupZilla support ad
blocking out of the box, Firefox doesn't. QupZilla even enables it by
default.
- Add-ons can only be installed if they are signed by Mozilla (an
iOS-style restriction completely incompatible with Free Software), and
they are also restricting the add-on API, throwing away their main
selling point.
And the Firefox trademark and packaging situation are such that we have no
control over these "features", nor any future ones that get added.
> I know that it is not a part of KDE project (and only God know why it is
> not Qt), but it is a very good and customizable browser.
But it does not integrate into a KDE Plasma environment and is thus a poor
choice for a KDE Plasma spin.
Firefox was picked in Fedora 23 as a stopgap because Konqueror was deemed
not good enough at the time. Now we actually have TWO viable Qt/KDE
alternatives:
* QupZilla, a Qt-only browser with nice KDE Plasma integration (native
dialogs, native icons, native progress report, etc.), is well-tested and
perfectly suited for production. It is based on QtWebEngine which is
itself based on Chromium, so it is compatible with almost every website on
the Internet. Security updates are also delivered with QtWebEngine
releases. I have been using QupZilla as my main browser for months, and
the features that were initially missing (e.g. printing support) have been
implemented.
* Konqueror, the native KDE browser, was ported to Qt5/KF5 and can now use
QtWebEngine and the revived (up to date with security fixes as well)
Qt(5)WebKit. There are still some issues with the port, and unfortunately
there is not much work going on upstream to fix them, but it needs to be
considered. Maybe even a Fedora KDE developer can look into the
regressions? But failing that, QupZilla is still there to be used!
Both are in fact already on the spin. So what is the spin still shipping
Firefox for? The stopgap is no longer needed!
Kevin Kofler
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