We don't have Chrome in Fedora so this leaves Firefox.
As long as there's no reliable data about how many users are affected
by this issue IMHO the whole discussion is bulls**t.
Firefox and it's new policies are open to interpretation. It's debatable whether add-on signing actually constitutes DRM or is something more like what Fedora does with it's *.rpm packages and 'dnf' validating official GPG keys from a single verified source. It's a thing that's meant to establish trust. Most add-on packages used by Firefox users in Linux are the same as those used by Windows/Mac users from the official Firefox extensions web-site.
Most users won't notice the change and will probably benefit from the added security. The web-browser has become the number one attack vector on the desktop for Linux/Mac/Windows. This merely prevents a malicious add-on from installing itself in the background or tricking the user into installing it through a software bundle or clicking something a website.
This FESCo ticket should have really been about making Chromium available from the official Fedora repositories. Google Chrome is the leading browser currently [1] and growing. It's also default on the two leading Linux distributions Chrome OS and Android. In a sense this forces users to use the official Google Chrome packages and these ship with proprietary DRM extensions and Flash which doesn't make sense.
Instead you should revise the ticket or file a new one and make this about packaging Chromium so that Fedora users who make Chrome their default can avoid having to use these proprietary schemes.
On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 12:00 PM, kendell clark <coffeekingms@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"I'll also add that the accessibility of those firefox forks is sometimes not as good as and sometimes much worse than firefox itself. This isn't always the case, but with icecat 24 for example, there were lots of little things, orca not being able to track the focus, controlls not being focusable, and when I brought them up to joanmeri I was told quite bruskly to "just use firefox". I don't like chrome or chromium, and my main reason for that is as I've said, google not talking to the assistive technology API's available on whichever platform it's running on, instead expecting you to download their own addon which somehow turns their internal representations of webpages into spoken text, using their own tts voices, instead of the system ones. In other words, I'm for sticking with firefox, but I will keep going if we switch to a fork, I'll just have more bugs to file.
On 01/11/2016 07:00 AM, Kalev Lember wrote:
On 01/10/2016 11:29 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Thu, 2016-01-07 at 14:26 +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Hi,
there is currently a case against Firefox discussed in FESCo:
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1518
We have many different opinions in this thread. Clearly, there is no
solution that will make everyone happy. I tried to formulate a
consensus position based on the comments in this thread, which I
suspect the majority of us can support:
"Fedora Workstation prefers to ship the latest release of Firefox, not
ESR releases. Shipping an unbranded version of Firefox is acceptable to
us, but not ideal. Shipping a version of Firefox that blocks unsigned
extensions is also acceptable to us, but not ideal."
In other words: we're fine with FESCo deciding for either unbranded or
locked-down Firefox, but we won't be very happy either way. Does this
seem fair?
My personal take on this is that we need to ship with a mainstream
browser that is actively developed and that web sites support. These
days, I think it's a choice between either Firefox or Chrome.
We don't have Chrome in Fedora so this leaves Firefox.
Also, shipping a browser with a widely recognizable name (Firefox) as
opposed to shipping a minor fork (Icecat) has a huge benefit when it
comes to people finding the web browser -- they will have used the same
browser on other operating systems, making switching to Fedora easier.
Habit plays a huge role. Take a familiar name away and it's suddenly
much harder for us to compete.
I think it would be fine to ask Firefox upstream to support additional
trust chains to support locally packaged extensions, but if that fails I
don't think we should go with anything as drastic as switching to an
unbranded Firefox fork.
Thanks
Kendell clark"
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