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Ubuntu Developers Revisit Replacing Firefox With Chromium
Via Phoronix comes news that Ubuntu is revisiting replacing Firefox with Chromium as the default browser. Reasons include that Chromium is the basis of Ubuntu Touch and their new web apps platform, and using a single browser for all versions of Ubuntu would simplify maintenance. From the article: "Expressed shortcomings of switching to Google's Chromium open-source web-browser is that data migration from Firefox isn't too obvious, extensions don't migrate between browsers, Chromium isn't supported on all architectures (e.g. PowerPC), the browser doesn't work with the Orca screen reader and doesn't integrate well for accessibility reasons, there is no native PDF plug-in, and Chromium is said to have worse performance under memory pressure. There were also some concerns expressed about differences with WebApps in Chromium. ... It looks like the switch to Chromium will happen in the name of a better user experience for the desktop with Chrome/Chromium now arguably surpassing Firefox in its features and performance while pushing Chromium as the default leads to a more consistent experience across Ubuntu form factors from phones/tablets to the desktop."
The Ubuntu community will have their input solicited as the next step. The Ubuntu Developer Summit session has notes and a full video of today's discussion.
Well Chrome has one if you want to use it, just doesn't come with Chromium. I am sure they want Chromium instead of Chrome for the whole "pure open-source" thing it has going for it, though.
Firefox is on the decline. I really do hope they switch gears and get Firefox up-to-par again. I would really hate to see Chrome dominating the web like IE once did. Mozilla just seems more interested in Rust and FirefoxOS these days. I know they are capable of doing more than one thing at a time but Firefox needs some serious love, I'd like it to be the focus again.
... I just switched back to Firefox after years with Chrome. The ol' girl has just gotten so good in these last few version; it's dev tools are damn near up to snuff with Chrome's-- and something, I can't quite put my finger on, is "nicer" about it. The way it handles animations just seems smoother to me. Plus I'm fearful of a Webkit/Blink only world. When there are monopolies standards go out the window, I'm looking at you Micro$oft.
I wonder if others are doing the same (switching back to FF), and they'll be reverting their decision here in a couple years... Hard to say, the browser wars are long from over...
Firefox works fine, comes with a wide variety of good extensions, and seems to be more configurable via about:config. Not only that, the privacy options are more obvious. As far as I can tell, the only way to get decent privacy settings with chromium by default is with command line arguments.
I can't but help think this decision is largely irrelevant to the majority of Ubuntu users. Unless I've somehow missed the news of Linux taking over the mainstream desktop, most users are technically savvy and undoubtedly already have their own browser preference and the knowledge to install it rendering discussions of upgrade paths largely irrelevant.
Sure Firefox users may dislike the extra step, but on the otherhand Chromium users will presumably be pleased that they no longer need to install it afterwards.
Message to Firefox developers: Please stop adding features that someone else can do with addons. For the life of me I can't figure out why Firefox started developing its own set of developer tools when Firebug is still one of the best tools on the market.
I beg of you to please strip anything out of Firefox that is not part to the web browsing experience and put it back in as a plugin if you have to. Just focus on being a web browser and having the best plug in interface possible.
If they try to force me to use Chrome, I will have to go find another distro.
Here's my current short list of things required to make Ubuntu usable:
After installing indicator-applet-session:
(This deletes ALL the default items in the Panel, by deleting the "Indicator Applet Complete".)
After you've installed compizconfig-settings-manager:
After you install apache2:
Chromium is the default in the current Ubuntu, besides which, installing Firefox is trivially easy on any Ubuntu desktop installation, see on my current Ubuntu desktop:
Chromium: Version 25.0.1364.160 Ubuntu 13.04 (25.0.1364.160-0ubuntu3)
Firefox 21.0: Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0
AccountKiller
How does one get from:
shortcomings of switching to Chromium
data migration from Firefox isn't too obvious,
extensions don't migrate between browsers,
Chromium isn't supported on all architectures (e.g. PowerPC),
the browser doesn't work with the Orca screen reader
and doesn't integrate well for accessibility reasons,
there is no native PDF plug-in,
and worse performance under memory pressure.
to:
the switch to Chromium will happen in the name of a better user experience
(oh that's right, Ubuntu are the people who thought Unity was a better user experience ;-)
I switched to Chromium for quite a while because some of my friends liked it, and I tried to put up with all the extra Javascript-enabled crap that was running because the JS-limiting options are very poor compared to NoScript running on Firefox.
Eventually I just couldn't take it anymore, and I had to switch back to FF. There's only so much suffering you can put up with, unless you're a true masochist.
Nothing but nothing beats a combination of Firefox with NoScript, FlashBlock, AdBlock and Ghostery add-ons, just nothing. They make the web usable again.
And Chromium will never get better in this area, because it's against Google's interest to allow users to block anything that interrupts the flow of advertising revenue and prevents user tracking. It'll be a sad day when any distro makes Chromium their default browser. Advertisers will wet themselves though.
Chrome is a trojan horse to weaken Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches.
And Web DRM? Of course it's going to be a HTML standard very soon because IE, Safari and... ding! Chrome are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM.
Chrome on Chromebook already has the EME DRM module. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with the h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google promised it would drop H.264 from Chrome to push WebM but did not and Mozilla was left holding the bag with WebM and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for patent encumbered H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves.
This space for rent.
I really could give a rat's fat patoot which is the "default" browser as long as I can choose the one I want. It's not like Windows where there are applications tying into the browser framework, or where you must use the default browser to download updates.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
For the last while, Firefox has improved and performed well. A while back the Firefox team made an interface change to the browser which made it harder to use. I posted a note to the team talking about why it was wrong etc. They thanked me, and changed it back. That's more that can be said for the Ubuntu team.
This is just another excuse for unification across the Ubuntu platforms which is the Ubuntu headlong charge into obscurity. Nighty night Ubuntu, fare thee well.
I mean, the trend is to remove choice and features and pretend that configuration makes it too hard for the poor lusers (ala, gnome3).
One bug with chromium that has been marked as WontFix for this very reason, is issue 11612. "You can install an extension (that doesn't work in most situations you need it to, such as in the default about:blank)!". As bad as firefox has been getting since version 2, at least *that* particular feature still can be turned on.
But I do have to ask, WhyTF would anyone want an inbuilt PDF viewer? That's the first thing I disable in browsers that do that by default (except in very old editions of SuSE, where it was installed into the system and not able to be disabled because SuSE, at least then, liked to load everything unconditionally and not overridable by the user). Yes, you can have a poor replacement for a PDF viewer that isn't a first class PDF viewer and can't print and is slow, and half the key bindings just plain don't work, or you can have it in a dedicated PDF viewer that does One Thing Well, just like Unix intended.
The most important reason why I use Mozilla Firefox is because it is Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla is one of the most important organizations for protecting our rights on the web. We are actively witnessing our freedom disappear from every aspect of our lives, including our Internet freedom. Google only protects our freedom when it happens to align with their business goals. They are profit driven, and that means our rights are their bargaining chips. I prefer the motivations of Mozilla and everything they represent.
I also love Firefox because it does everything I want it to do, and it's constantly improving. Eventually, Google will shift their focus on other projects and Firefox will be leaps ahead.
I am extremely disappointed to hear that Cannonical wants to replace Firefox with Chromium in Ubuntu. I have been repeatedly disappointed by Cannonical and Ubuntu to the point where I've decided all future operating installations will be a different distribution. For my desktop which still runs Ubuntu, I've long ditched Unity for Cinnamon, and I've replaced Ubuntu with Gentoo on my laptop. When the time comes, I plan on installing Gentoo on my desktop as well. I'm sure I'm going to get annoyed about all the packages that are designed to work with Ubuntu, but I just don't want to spend any more time uninstalling all the default programs, and then installing the ones I want. At least with Gentoo, I will never have to do another painful upgrade again (It uses a rolling release).
Firefox provides a consistent user experience on all hardware targets which ubuntu loves to emphasize. The best analogy I could give is this decision is like Canonical deciding to remove vi/emacs from the repository and announcing it will be using microsoft notepad as the default programmer's editor. Firefox has matured a great deal while chromium is still a little one in terms of age. Replacing X.org with wayland when X-Window has been around for 30 years and evolving/maturing is nonsensical. Wayland will be breaking all the time causing confusing and frustration for users. X is slow on tablets for the time being because ARM tablet hardware is still mind-blowingly slow.
Ubuntu screwing up their roadmap. DEBIAN's roadmap is stable. Debian Wheezy version rocks. I recommend Debian Wheezy to other consumers looking for a new PC/Laptop.
Simply having X and Firefox in the repository is not enough. By having the Linux userbase switch away to Android/Mir/Touch/ChromeOS, Canonical/Google are fragmenting the Linux User base even more and making it easier for takeover again by Apple/Microsoft/RIM. By using the same browser across all Linux flavors on all hardware targets, it would bring strength in numbers to convince others to give Linux a try because they are already familiar with Firefox on Windows. Any web browser segmentation provides more leverage to Microsoft and Apple which negatively impacts on the Linux/OSS appeal.
I think Canonical is doing this bold move is because they want to retaliate against Mozilla creating their own OS fork "FirefoxOs" for mobile targets which is a huge failure also by the way for the same fragmentation reasons. It also hints Canonical getting closer to Google's bed. Unless Canonical can easily provide binaries for all hardware targets like Cyanogen, FirefoxOS will fail. Ubuntu on mobile hardware is interesting because of their unofficial under-the-hood dependency to Cyanogenmod. It's funny however that Lildebi on Android compiles/runs Debian Linux on mobile ARM hardware. Full-blown native Debian on mobile hardware shouldn't be too far around the corner thanks to the Guardian project. Canonical isn't the only player on the mobile space and that's a good thing. It means if Canonical/Google make bad decisions and we don't like their direction mobile/desktop targets, we won't be locked into their systems. We already suffered enough vendor lock-in with Apple and Microsoft products throughout the American/Canadian Governments, I would hate to see another occurrence of that with the Canonical/Google brandname. Decisions need to be made as LINUX-flavor neutral on all hardware platforms in order to prevent this vendor lock-in from ever happening again.
Keep X/GNOME/KDE/Firefox/Thunderbird and don't mess with it. That's the current user base that made UBUNTU popular in the first place. Mess with that and people will move more quickly to the other Linux flavors if they haven't already. I like Ubuntu Firefox/Gnome/emacs, but I like Debian Wheezy even more now because at least they seem to be more consistent with their roadmap and don't impose changes on their userbase the way Canonical/Google do now.
A previous comment I made was marked down so low that it's hidden from view and worthless. Are forums here just a google/canonical propaganda machine when it's to their interest? I'm starting to understand slashdot/reddit are a hidden form of marketing spin and slashdot/reddit highlight opinions that promote a certain angle. If you don't agree with that point of view, you get marked down to obscurity and disappear. It does take away the concept of community if opinions are not viewed as equal and considered equally. I don't mind being marked down point-wise, but to be hidden into obscurity destroys the value of contributing an opinion to slashdot/reddit. Oddly enough Conde-Nast(HUGE MEDIA COMPANY) owns both reddit and slashdot which does solidify the idea that perhaps reddit and slashdot are just marketing spin instruments after all and that they negate/hide any consumer opinion
Since they are coming out w/ Mir - an alternative to X & Wayland, why don't they come out w/ their own browser as well? KDE has Konqueror/Rekonq, GNOME as GNOME Web (Epiphany), OS-X/iOS has Safari and Windows has IE, they too could come out w/ something unique to Unity!
Mint? Maybe LMDE? Or siduction?