Default Browser Follow-up

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Michael Hall wrote on 14/08/13 21:09:
> 
> On 08/14/2013 02:48 PM, Benjamin Kerensa wrote:
> 
> ...
>> I do not think the any technically valid reasons have been 
>> discussed actually. Most of the feedback has been in opposition 
>> of changing to Chromium not supporting the change.

That most feedback on a change is negative doesn't necessarily mean
the change is misguided. Opponents are often more motivated to give
feedback than supporters are.

>> I do not believe this is a decision that Jason and the Desktop 
>> Team get to make which is why they opened it up to feedback from 
>> all developers and the support was just not there had it been 
>> then the change would have been made.
>> 
>> I think you are absolutely right that there is not going to be a 
>> 100% consensus for this change because in reality the support is 
>> not there and no solid technical justification has been provided.
>> Firefox can do all of the things that Jason outlined that
>> Chromium does the fact of the matter is that Jason and the new
>> maintainer are Chromium users and would like everyone else to use
>> their favorite browser versus sticking with Firefox which has
>> been a reliable choice for Ubuntu.
> 
> Let's please keep the technical decision making based on technical 
> discussion and merits.  Which browser Ubuntu ships by default is 
> not personal.

Technical reasons are not the only valid reasons. And it's
understandable that someone might start wondering about non-technical
reasons after continued vagueness about which reasons are important.

In January 2010, Rick Spencer announced that Ubuntu's default search
engine would change from Google to Yahoo. The rationale was
straightforward and sensible: Ubuntu relies on Canonical's
sponsorship, Canonical is funded in part by search engine revenue
sharing, Yahoo was a reasonable choice, and they had offered to share
more than Google did.
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2010-January/002396.html>
We ended up switching back to Google before the 10.04 release.
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-April/030589.html>

Were those technical decisions? No, they were financial ones. Were
they reasonable all the same? Absolutely. If a similar thing is
happening with the default browser, we could say so. Then discussion
could focus on whether Chromium is a reasonable choice, rather than on
which browser is marginally *technically* better than the other.

>> Ok lets judge browsers on their implementations, support models 
>> and road maps all of which Firefox triumphs at. Lets not change 
>> to Chromium because it fancies a minority in our community. (57% 
>> of people voted to keep Firefox two months ago 
>> http://polldaddy.com/poll/7108833/?view=results)
> 
> I agree that we should use those criteria to judge, as well as any 
> other *technical* criteria that is relevant, such as compatibility 
> with our other form factors (we use WebKit for webbrowser-app on 
> Touch, and there are QML bindings for WebKit in our SDK).  There 
> are many things to consider in this, but an online poll isn't one 
> of them.
> 
> ...

Chromium does not use WebKit. It uses Blink. If you did not know that,
perhaps you could be more restrained in championing technical criteria.

As I've mentioned before, my main concern is a non-technical one too:
recognizability. Most people have heard of Firefox, and Chrome, but
hardly anyone has heard of Chromium.

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