On Fri, 2014-06-06 at 18:52 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote: > Meanwhile, Epiphany (GNOME Web) keeps getting better and better, > perhaps we should consider it as the default? As a full-time Epiphany user, I'm confident in saying that Firefox should remain the default browser in Fedora 21. Let me preface this with a defense of Epiphany: Epiphany's desktop integration is dramatically better than Firefox's, and I believe it is very important to plan for it to eventually replace Firefox as the default browser in Fedora Workstation. Firefox's developers have shown no interest in attempting to conform to the GNOME HIG, and the newest version of Epiphany is very good at doing so (with the sole exception of the bookmarks dialog, which will need to be rewritten in the future). I think brand recognition is not an appropriate metric by which to choose the default browser. I also think extensibility is not an important metric. Epiphany is intentionally as simple as possible, and users who rely on particular Firefox extensions should feel welcome to install Firefox. (Firefox should certainly be featured in GNOME Software if it were not to be the default.) I've found that website compatibility issues exist, but they are rare and not significant enough to disqualify it from becoming our default. A notable exception would be YouTube, which is completely broken in Epiphany lacking the H.264 codec from rpmfusion (which shouldn't be necessary as YouTube has WebM videos). This would need to be fixed. But I think Epiphany is not yet ready to replace Firefox, and will likely be received negatively by users if this were to happen now. To name just a few issues with the latest version: there are serious unresolved TLS security issues, the adblocker blocks all sorts of legit images and styling, opening History hangs the browser, it loads HTTPS pages that fail certificate validation with no warning (and sometimes spuriously fails pages that ought to validate), and it reports Mac OS X in the user agent, tricking sites into displaying Mac-specific downloads and information. The version of Epiphany in Fedora 20 crashes almost every single time it is closed, and often when you try to open hyperlinks from a different program. This has been fixed upstream for a while, but it's an indication that nobody is maintaining it in Fedora. I instead recommend packaging GNOME integration Firefox extensions and installing them by default. They are not as good as Epiphany and never will be, but it's better than nothing. Michael
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