The Sad State Of Web Browser Support Currently Within Debian

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Sad State Of Web Browser Support Currently Within Debian

When it comes to the state of packaged web browsers for Debian GNU/Linux, unfortunately it leaves a lot to be desired at the moment and for those wanting to be secure and up-to-date it can mean resorting to proprietary or un-packaged browser builds...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Web-Browser-Packages-Debian

[-MacNuke-]

But hey at least everything is stable af, right? Right?

[Hibbelharry]

But hey at least everything is stable af, right? Right?

Yip. Security can be exploited in an absolute reliable manner, it has never been better.

[Trevelyan]

I hope that backports at least gets a newer mesa and firefox, to give at least one route out of this.

[franglais125]

Michael I was going to write to you about this precisely.

I was shocked by Debian's current state (wrt browsers), but also shocked not to see a stronger reaction and reporting about it.
Only r/debian was flooded with suchs posts, nothing elsewhere.

[rmnscnce]

I never actually used Debian for desktop before, so I was under the impression that it actually packages up to date browsers. Sad to see my impressions are wrong. I believe browsers are one of the things that actually need to be updated constantly (at least once every major version)

[Particle]

Maybe that explains why Vivaldi stopped working after a system update. It became extremely slow, and after some debugging I discovered that hardware acceleration wasn't working anymore. Tried chromium and found the same problem. The modern web basically doesn't work without it. Amazon's site is such an extremely bloated behemoth that it is barely usable even WITH acceleration.

Side note: Using Edge right now, and amusingly its hardware acceleration works flawlessly despite also being chrome-based (96.x).

[madinside]

Has anyone tried using flatpak chromium on Debian? Same performance issues?

I don't use Debian on my desktop, but as a new laptop is planned for christmas I considered Debian for a short moment. Alternatives are Arch Linux and Ubuntu at the moment. But I don't want to annoy my wife with Arch and Ubuntu … well, Canonical's decisions are not what I want (e.g. Snap).

[kneekoo]

I praise Debian for offering stable software, but at some point they will have to understand that stable is not the only thing that counts. The package maintainers need a better strategy when it comes to software like Mesa, drivers and especially browsers, which are a pain to maintain but obviously not optional. Better hardware, more people, I don't know what they need but they have to level up.

[juxuanu]

Using Flatpak is a great alternative in this case.