Discussions Have Started Again About The Default Browser For Ubuntu

[tegs]

Hmm, sounds like FUD to me. At this point, anything is more private than Windows 10/8.1/7

There's always the FSF endorsed Trisquel 7 (https://trisquel.info) based off of 14.04

[[email protected]]

For those of you that thinks Firefox = privacy, have you read the EULAs of the services that Mozilla is providing in the plugins Pocket and Hello? Have you noted that Firefox send data to Mozilla about your use of Firefox by default? Have you see that they are selling advertising based in your surfing, directly in your face when you open a new tab?

This is the privacy champion fighting for us?

My friends, there is no free lunch if you want privacy. Want it? So go take your browser and be prepared to click in a lot of menus and sub-menus to change things, and install 2 or 3 plugins AND be careful with the options marked in those plugins.

[SystemCrasher]

And why someone should care about flash in 2015? Its dead, Jimm, its dead. Stop using necromancy on his body, dammit.

[Onuca_V]

And why someone should care about flash in 2015? Its dead, Jimm, its dead. Stop using necromancy on his body, dammit.

That's exactly what I was thinking. They should support the massive drop of flash player by not holding an Ubuntu LTS release based on NPAPI thingies, especially Flash Player. Anyone who needs flash player can easily install google-chrome, hell, they could even add a checkbox at installation time for google chrome browser (and comment about playing online videos or something) right next to the checkbox they already use for proprietary stuff.

[madjr]

Youtube switched to HTML5 by default already, so who really cares about flash? Even Unity3d is dropping its plugin for webGL, meaning we Linux users will finally play those games on kongregate that ask for it. But I prefer steam anyway.

Firefox is also going to switch to using Chrome plugins and dropping theirs.

FF however for the meantime still uses less ram, so maybe is still worth keeping default?

[Awesomeness]

I'm not aware of any other major browser that has ESR/LTS releases.

[Daktyl198]

Firefox is also going to switch to using Chrome plugins and dropping theirs.

Chrome Extensions** not plugins. PPAPI (Chrome's plugin interface) has no documentation and is a constantly moving target, making it near to impossible to Mozilla to implement correctly.

Also, I don't think they're dropping support for their extensions, just adding support for Chrome ones. Chrome extensions are much easier to write than Firefox extensions, but are significantly less powerful in what they can do; many users are still going to want those "powerful" extensions around.

*Back to the topic* This is the stupidest discussion ever. "Firefox is going to be removing NPAPI support which will cause breakage so let's move to a browser that DOESN'T HAVE NPAPI SUPPORT because fuck logic".

If it's going to be an LTS release, don't screw things up by moving to a new browser yet. Wait until the release AFTER.

[Delgarde]

Also, I don't think they're dropping support for their extensions, just adding support for Chrome ones. Chrome extensions are much easier to write than Firefox extensions, but are significantly less powerful in what they can do; many users are still going to want those "powerful" extensions around.

They *will* be dropping support for the current extension model, because that's the entire point behind adopting the Chome API - the current model exposes too much of the browser internals to extensions, making it impossible for them to make changes to Firefox internals without breaking extensions.

[jacob]

Do they seriously think that someone would use a mobile browser on a PC? I don't know what does Mark smoke but it doesn't seem to do him much good. I have loved Ubuntu for many years but now I'm more fed up with them with each passing day. Personally I think that the whole "convergence" concept would be a fundamentally stupid idea even if Canonical was capable of actually getting it off the ground, which they obviously aren't.

[NateHubbard]

They *will* be dropping support for the current extension model, because that's the entire point behind adopting the Chome API - the current model exposes too much of the browser internals to extensions, making it impossible for them to make changes to Firefox internals without breaking extensions.

Which also means that Firefox won't have as capable of extensions. They will be much more like the ones you'll find in Chrome.