Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Status of google chrome and chromium

[A.J. Venter]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>    On the plugin side, there is also a catch - I can find no way to make
>    chromium use gnash or libsfw - but it seems to be able to import adobe
>    flash from firefox if it's there... so we have a browser that seems to
>    only support the non-free flash plugin, I will
>    do some more checking though - I may just be missing the methodology.
>
> That is definitely an issue we should raise.  Thanks.

As others have pointed out, chromium does use gnash without issue - I
just didn't finish checking (hence my qualification above that this
check was in progress) - the results on it are positive.

> > I wonder, however, what's so special about this browser that you
> > took the premature decision to make it the default?
> >
> > IMO it is a bad decision to make a "foreign" (in the GUI/toolkit
> > sense) application the default -- if GNOME is the default desktop
> > for your distro, Epiphany is the only sane choice as it integreates
> > best with the desktop.  Likewise for KDE & Konqeror.
>
This is a valid point - but definitely not to the point of religion as
you're taking it. The most integrated app should be used when the
available choices are functionally equivalent. At this stage, chromium
is by far the most advanced browser on the market. It's the first one
in years to actually do some real rethinking and innovation - ideas
like tabbed processes, vm'd scripting, and sandboxed plugins make for
a much faster (and far more importantly) a hugely more secure browser
than anything else out there.

Let's ignore the freedom issues with microsoft software just for a
moment to make a point:
By your logic - windows users - should only ever use internet explorer
and never install another browser, yet the vast majority of firefox's
userbase are on windows.
What this tells us - is that users will choose the best tool available
for them, even if they have to sacrifice some integration for it.
Firefox/IceCat has a design that has been significantly ahead of I.E.
for years, and thus it took a lot of IE's marketshare, despite IE's
incumbent preinstalled position.
If you enter software freedom into the equation of course, both IE and
Windows get discarded :D

Integration is a very important concept - when choosing between
functional equivalents, it's the trump card, but the bigger the gap in
functionality becomes, the less it matters to users. Most KDE users
user firefox/ice-cat because frankly it works better than konqeuror
(it renders a lot more pages correctly - konqueror is rapidly
improving but it's still way behind), and chromium is more advanced
than either by a massive difference.
Since chromium is free, I hope we'll see it's innovations filter down
into other browsers and reduce the gap again. Not locking the code
down means this is easy and likely.

But basically, the short answer is: what makes it so special is that
it's the first really innovative browser in a decade and a half, the
first attempt to redesign how browsers work to face the challenges of
the web as it is used today... it's so special, because it's the first
actual advancement in it's field since mosaic.

All that said, this debate is off-topic so we should probably stop
there. Which browser a distro ships or a user chooses is completely
irrelevant  to this list - what is relevant to this list is only the
licensing of the potential choices, as that is what determines which
ones we should never even consider as potential candidates.

Ciao
A.J.

-- 
A.J. Venter
Founder and lead developer, Kongoni GNU/Linux
www.kongoni.co.za
www.silentcoder.co.za - Blog