Firefox as default browser in Fedora

[Steven Garrity]

Christopher Blizzard wrote:

 > Internally we're having the firefox vs. epiphany discussion at least 
for Red Hat (which may or may not have anything to do with fedora, it's 
hard to say at this point.)
 >
 > Anyway, there are a few major stumbling blocks:
 >
 > o Firefox/phoenix/firebird hasn't reached 1.0, nor has anyone made 
the promises assocated with long term profile stability that come along 
with it.


True. Though it is clear that from now (0.8) on, the focus is on 
polishing and stabilizing for 1.0. As detailed in this weblog post 
(http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/towards_firefox_10.html) Ben 
Goodger states in a forum that the two priorities for 1.0 are Seamless 
Data Migration from other browsers and Automated extension update, 
stability and version compatibility. Good news.


 > o Firefox doesn't have automatic profile migration.  This is a _huge_ 
stumbling block for people coming from the Mozilla world.


Yup. See above.

 > o Firefox doesn't look like other apps on the desktop.  That is, it 
doesn't have enough of a native look and feel.  I'm not that worried 
about the layout of pages - which I think is excellent in gecko in 
general - but the UI is odd.  Preferences are different than the HIG and 
just about every other gnome app, button sizes and layout are all wrong, 
menus are wrong, icons are wrong, and it would be a huge amount of work 
to sync all this up.  Plus it's a cost that you have to continue to pay 
over and over again since it's not something that would stay in sync.
 >
 > This is something that has echos of the old Netscape vs. Mozilla UI 
problems that were so huge a couple of years ago, and was one of the 
main reasons that the old phoenix project was started.  People want 
control over the UI and they don't want to have to deal with people to 
have what they want.  For whatever reason, people won't compromise over 
UI.  So we have flame wars.  And we have forks.  And we go 
round-n-round.  And we're having this discussion again.
 >
 > Anyway, the point being that the UI for epiphany is basically what we 
want and it's hard to change over to using firefox which is still 
changing a bit over time.


Well, Firefox clearly doesn't follow all of the HIG, and theoretically 
cannot follow them as, in some cases, they clash (reasonably so) with 
the equivalent guidelines for OS X and Windows. However, they have done 
a very nice job in making Firefox play well in Gnome. The XFT/GTK2 
builds have a nice native feel in Gnome.

I've been working with on new Mozilla Visual Identity team and we are 
acutely aware of the difficulty in wanted to be both native/integrated 
and cross-platform. So far - I think we're doing a pretty good job. For 
example, if you try Firefox 0.8 on Mac OS X, you'll see that it has as 
native a feel as Camino. I think we can do the same on Gnome.

Steven Garrity