Default browser of FC3?

[Ricardo Veguilla]

On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 02:17 +0200, Lars E. Pettersson wrote:
> On 10/10/2004 01:11 AM, Ricardo Veguilla wrote:
> > I don't want to turn this into a browser war, but why do people think
> > epiphany should not be the *default* browser?
> 
> No not a war, just splitting of hairs :-)
> 
> I mentioned some reasons earlier, but one may also ask the question, why 
> Epiphany? Why not Mozilla, Konquerer, or Firefox?

Well, since I'm interested in hearing what is wrong with epiphany,
asking why other browsers aren't the default is pretty much irrelevant.

> I think the default should reflect the number of users of that 
> application. I.e. the most used browser should be the default, and I do 
> not think that Epiphany is the most used browser at the moment. 

Quite frankly I don't think the current number of users is a good reason
to choose the distribution's default browser. Based on this argument,
many people would never be exposed to new software, among other things.
I'm obviously assuming that all the popular browser are available for
those who want to use them.

> It is 
> used, I know, but not the most used. I do not think either that it will 
> be the most used, it is probably too minimalistic for most users. So why 
> Epiphany?

Its simple, minimal and tightly integrated to Gnome, thats exactly why
the Gnome project decided to use it as official browser and I think its
the same in the Red-Hat/Fedora case.

> At the moment I think the most used browser in the Fedora community is 
> Mozilla, based on it being the "default" now, and the spread use it has 
> both in Linux, and other operating systems. As the Mozilla team now seem 
> to push Firefox, I would seem logical for Fedora to follow this and set 
> Firefox as the default.

Mozilla is the most popular because it was the default.

Epiphany is not popular because its not the default... so...
Epiphany should not be the default because its not popular.

Firefox should be the default because, even though its not the most
popular (the ideal element of the default browser, in your opinion), its
the offspring of Mozilla which is the most popular.

If I understood your position correctly, your arguments against epiphany
(which was what I asked for in my original email) are:
 
a) its minimalistic (which seems to be the "main" feature of epiphany)
b) its not the most popular browser at this moment

Btw, I don't have anything against firefox (which is my default browser
in WinXP, until a win32 epiphany port comes along :) or galeon (which I
used extensively in my Slackware years), its just that I think that
epiphany is much better for a default browser.   

> 
> > I mean, its not like its
> > going be the only browser, if I remember correctly, firefox is going to
> > be included in FC3 and galeon is available in many third party repos
> 
> Your quite correct! And perhaps the ideal solution would be what I 
> mentioned earlier, a box asking "Would you like this application to be 
> your default" showing up until a default have been chosen (or a box with 
> the text, "Chose default application ..." when opening an http-url, 
> etc., you get the picture)

If you (and I, and everyone else that likes something different) can
change the default browser to something else, whats the point of asking
a user who may not know what firefox, epiphany,galeon or mozilla, to
chose a browser? Using your example about asking the user...right now
the FC assumes that the user selected "Chose default applications ..." I
don't see any problem with that. 

I think that this boils down to the question: Who is the target user for
that default app/setting/etc? In my experience default values are for
newbies... experienced user usually changed the defaults to whatever
they like (except when the default "Just Work" ;).  

Regards,

-- 
Ricardo Veguilla <veguilla at hpcf.upr.edu>