Debian and other distributions (Trisquel, gNewSense, GuixSD) have used unbranded forks of Firefox for years and I don't think this has been a problem for them. In any case I don't think we can call "drastic" something that multiple other distributions do. The Debian and GNU projects consider Mozilla Firefox as proprietary software because it does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines or GNU's definition of free software. Fedora didn't follow that stance. I don't think whether we're using a fork or not is important. It'll be just as up-to-date, just as well supported by websites, and would work like Firefox so habbit would not be a problem. The Firefox name and branding is a problem for Fedora (it prevents us from modifying the browser), not a benefit. On Mon, 2016-01-11 at 14:00 +0100, 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.
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