Ubuntu Developers Revisit Replacing Firefox With Chromium 153
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.
Re:Fine by me (Score:5, Informative)
How is Firefox on the decline? I use it on all of my primary systems and it's as snappy as ever. In fact it's so good that I find Chrome offers no advantages and lacks useful tools like Noscript.
Re:Fine by me (Score:2, Informative)
Firefox isn't on the decline, people just aren't paying attention to it anymore. You make it sound like they haven't been spending two years rewriting their Javascript engine, garbage collecting, HTML page layout rendering, and a multitude of other things.
While they're modernized their core browser and catching up to Chrome, they're also working on FirefoxOS, asm.js, and a whole host of other things. Just because you haven't been keeping up doesn't mean you're correct to say they're "declining".
Re: Fine by me (Score:2, Informative)
As a tech, duckduckgo isn't fantastic. I'm still hunting for a search engine that at least *sometimes* returns more than 2 relevant results (especially since the first 2 results usually aren't what I need).
As a tech, duckduckgo returns whatever bing returns :) It's just an anonymizing front end to bing.
Re:Fine by me (Score:4, Informative)
The Mozilla folks decided to make the public at-large their new beta-testers. That's not entirely unusual in the Open Source world.
But they do have a far more "stable" release you can use, instead. The ESR release works great, doesn't get all the new cruft, and generally just works. It's the version of Firefox in RHEL/CentOS repos, so most users are using it. There's no reason not-to go with ESR, except that Mozilla makes it hard to find:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html [mozilla.org]
Re: Fine by me (Score:4, Informative)
No. It's not. [duckduckgo.com]: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, Yandex, and Blekko." Please don't FUD on the Duck.
Re:Chrome is a trojan horrse.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chrome is a trojan horrse.. (Score:3, Informative)