Re: Opportunity for Epiphany

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 23:16 +0200, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hey dudes,
> 
> Thus far the major distros have all been keen to ship Firefox, as it has the
> momentum of public recognition, provides an improved but ultimately familiar
> user experience and has the resources of mozilla.org (and Google) behind it.
> I don't think that's the wrong choice, by the way - Firefox is a really good
> product, and Epiphany isn't stunningly better integrated or featured that it
> poses serious competition. (That's not to say it doesn't rock, just that the
> competition is tough!)

Personally I don't like firefox at all because it doesn't feel as fast
as epiphany does. I don't like the way firefox works with tabs, etc. The
reason why I do have firefox on my system is because I need the
gtkmozembed component from it for epiphany and galeon.

> That said, there is a massive opportunity opening up for Epiphany, and if we
> are smart and listen to our users, we can "reclaim the browser". *cough* ;-)
> 
> Firefox is rapidly becoming a pain in the behind for Linux distributors, due
> to mozilla.org's trademark and security update policies. Everyone is feeling
> it, no one is enjoying it.

Epiphany is also a pain because of this, because it depends on either
mozilla or firefox. As mozilla-* and epiphany maintainer for firefox, I
know what you mean with these ;)

> Epiphany is an interesting solution for the trademark issue, especially when
> you compare the level of desktop integration (hopefully this will improve,
> too). Combined with xulrunner, it may relieve some of the support probems. I
> can't say for sure - it depends on the API/ABI commitment made by xulrunner.

The trademark issue is a real problem for Debian and Ubuntu because of
strict license policy. Archlinux has permission to use the official
logos, so it isn't a real issue for us.
About XULRunner: do we _NEED_ to be compatible with XUL? I haven't seen
a single web application written in XUL yet. Most of the stuff I see is
either serverside, ActiveX, Flash or Java.

> Anyway, just wanted to point this opportunity out to you guys. Is it time to
> reclaim the browser? :-)

They did with the release of 1.6.0 already ;-)