Per distro

Story: Firefox Losing Foothold on Linux Distros?Total Replies: 6
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azerthoth

Jun 15, 2010
1:18 PM EDT
We were looking at doing exactly that some time ago, we were the first distro to have Beryl (at the time) functioning OOB on our installer. We were looking at being the first to switch over to defaulting to chromium awhile ago as well. The upshot of the debate was, we were not even going to include it in default install until some questions were answered. How much of the 'call home' is left in chromium?

Until such time as that can be answered (and alleviated) it is better to default to more secure than risk known or suspected risks. We have it in repository if people want it, but like ssh being present, having it active by default is irresponsible. It should be up to the user to decide how fast and loose they want to play with their data and security, not the distro maintainers.
dinotrac

Jun 15, 2010
2:13 PM EDT
Nice to see a little fire under the Firefox feet, though.

Firefox has become a bit bloated, buggy and memory-leaky. Hard to recall that it started out as a brash young lightweight alternative to the humongaloid Mozilla monster.
Steven_Rosenber

Jun 15, 2010
3:31 PM EDT
Firefox really needs to address these performance issues. Both Javascript speed and basic rendering need to get faster, and the browser needs to be built so it lets go of CPU when there's no user activity.

Chrome/Chromium and Opera can do this - Firefox needs to work toward it.
caitlyn

Jun 15, 2010
11:47 PM EDT
In addition to Chromium and Opera some of the lightweight browsers like Midori and Kazehakase have become more and more capable and are very much worth a look. Last I checked (and it's been a while) Epiphany had a Gecko engine but still was lighter and faster than Firefox. There really are some good alternatives out there if people bother to look.
rijelkentaurus

Jun 16, 2010
12:04 AM EDT
All above is true. However, let me say that Firefox is still WAYYYYY better than IE. Let's not poop on those who don't deserve poop.

However, I do find myself using Chromium on PCLOS, and it's very, very fast.
hkwint

Jun 16, 2010
10:20 AM EDT
Quoting:It should be up to the user to decide how fast and loose they want to play with their data and security, not the distro maintainers.


Hence, Gentoo?

Quoting:There really are some good alternatives out there if people bother to look.


Konqueror will be based on WebKit soon. It might be a nice 'Google'-replacement.
azerthoth

Jun 17, 2010
1:29 AM EDT
hkwint of course hense Gentoo, and Funtoo as well. While I have been known to run the odd test for drobbins once in awhile, when I start talking we in distro team sense, I am invariably talking about Sabayon. It's handy that I stay plugged in to upstream and sidestream (daniel still does some amazing work), but my work and love is for Sab.

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