Fwd: what is the reason for not making epiphany the default browser?

[Robin Sonefors]

tor 2006-01-05 klockan 09:22 -0800 skrev Corey Burger:
> 
> (Putting my Userful hat on)
> 
> For a quick perspective, we at Userful ship Epiphany and not Firefox.
> I should note for those who don't know, 95% of the users who use our
> stuff don't even know they are using Linux, let alone Fedora Core,
> GNOME or Epiphany.
> 
> What does this mean for Ubuntu? I think a webbrowser is a webbrowser
> to most users. Your average grandma is never going to install any of
> the 9 million plugins for Firefox that are out there and thus doesn't
> need that capability. But they do want a consistent print/open dialog,
> etc.
I agree completely with the previous speaker. Consistency is one of the
most important aspects of Gnome (the way I see it). Epiphany uses the
same browser engine, and can thus do it's job as well as Firefox: that
is, show webpages. That is really all the browser-features you use. On
top of that, it also does it the Right Way with respect to Gnome.

I read something on the breezy devel forum about this a while back: 
        What sounds better: "Ubuntu includes the Firefox browser, that
        is popular on Windows", or "Ubuntu includes a highly integrated
        web browser called Epiphany. It also makes it simple to install
        the popular Firefox"?
Something like that. If we base our decisions on popularity, what are we
doing with Linux?

The tools I use the most are browser, IM app, IRC app, mail app, and
document editor, in that order. Firefox, X-chat and OpenOffice - more
than half of my personal top five - isn't properly integrated with the
rest of the system. That does not give a very good impression.

But why start with Epiphany? I'd say Abiword is a far better program
than OpenOffice in every aspect I've seen, and what I've heard of
Gnumeric (don't use it) is that it is better than OpenOffice too -
Epiphany is not much more than equal to firefox (IMHO, of course - it
has a very annoying tab handling)
> 
> Also, there is a wiki page on this:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EpiphanyDefaultBrowser
> 
> Corey
>