Google Chromium In Lucid

[Dylan McCall]

On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 20:30 +0000, Alexander H Deriziotis wrote:
> i have to disagree w promoting chromium here.
> 
> Firefox is developed by an independent foundation w no business agenda
> behind it. It is a grassroots project which has become the figurehead
> of successful open source projects.
> 
> It also has an inclusive and collaborative development model which
> encourages volunteering.
> 
> Chrome on the other hand has none of these things (as far as ive seen,
> not that ive looked very deeply).
> 
> The point is that firefox embodies the spirit of open source and will
> always be neutral while chrome will always inherently be driven by
> google and a profit- driven agenda.
> 
> Alex
> 

I don't agree with this reasoning. I think we all love Mozilla; they do
awesome stuff for the web. Their products are excellent, as is the
Mozilla community.

However, Blender is also an amazing open source project with an
_incredible_ community and a non-profit public benefit corporation (the
Blender Foundation) beneath. There are very few operating systems
shipping it by default, but it gets along just fine because certain
users like to use it. It deserves to be prominently noted, for example
in the Software Centre, but it doesn't need to be installed by default!

While I can see where you're coming from (that Mozilla is healthy for
the ecosystem and deserves many points for that + some free publicity),
I think it is important to keep in mind how the software affects the
Ubuntu product as a whole. From my point of view, bugs such as #18995
make it a poor fit for end users.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.5/+bug/18995

I would consider it just dandy if Firefox fixed all of its bugs
involving integration (from a user perspective) in a nice way. It's not
that Chromium is immune, given its crazy habit of shipping its own
versions of libraries. As it is, though, Chromium feels a lot closer.



I do agree that it would be pretty rash to jump on this for Lucid+1,
unless something amazing happens, because Chromium is really very new.
Development on Lucid+2 would begin a bit after ChromeOS's official
appearance in the real world. At that point Chromium would be thoroughly
tested and debugged. We could confidently expect Google's ongoing
commitment to the browser's Linux version, in particular, as a stable
product.

I think it would be worthwhile if there was a commitment to properly
discuss the default browser choice while planning Lucid+2, or something
along those lines. It could act as strong incentive for Mozilla to do
better where Firefox currently loses to Chromium in Linux. With that,
the geniuses at Mozilla could pull a rabbit out of a hat, returning
their browser to its rightful place in my heart :)



Thanks,
Dylan McCall


PS: All that said, Epiphany remains the only contender that ships an SVG
icon. Firefox and Chromium are both doing raster graphics alone. We lose
points for consistency there, too.