[Mageia-dev] Talk of Browsers

Mon Oct 4 15:41:06 CEST 2010

On 3 October 2010 20:19, Richard Walker <richard.j.walker at ntlworld.com> wrote:
+>
+>
+> But are we always knowledgeable enough to be able to set up the system to
+> use our choice?
+>
+> I confess to being a Mandriva Linux user for only 10 years but I have been
+> an Opera user (and purchaser) for a year or two before that. I ALWAYS have
+> difficulty when removing Firefox and replacing it with Opera as I can NEVER
+> find all of the nooks and crannies of the system and various software
+> packages which presume that Firefox must be available.
+>
+> I would be much happier to discover that a distribution had taken my
+> choices seriously enough to check with me during the install and then make
+> sure that my choice is properly and fully integrated.
+>
+> Then perhaps we could highlight applications which expect no other browser
+> than Firefox and proceed to educate their authors/packagers as to the
+> importance of user choices.
+>
+>>
+>> Majority of users do not want choice.
+>>
+>
+> OK, that may be true, but when one of that majority decides to broaden the
+> horizons of their browsing experience then will they magically be learned
+> enough to be able to fix all of the integration issues for themselves? I
+> suspect not.
+>
+> An install time selector screen and supporting scripts would be a very good
+> starting point for a "Change Default Browser" wizard, much as XFDrake tries
+> to hide the complexities of switching video drivers.
+>
+> Richard
+>
+
+The point is, such scripts break all the time. e.g. chromium-browser
+has a "make chrome the default browser" button, the problem is, it
+works only under GNOME, but doesn't work under KDE4 or XFCE. It's
+using a variant of the xdg-utils scripts...
+
+xdg-utils is trying to do the huge job of working with all possible
+desktop environments, this is, by its very nature, a hard thing to
+accomplish.
+
+Firefox also has a "make firefox the default web browser", again it
+works only with GTK/GConf based applications, but it doesn't change
+KDE settings.
+
+If upstream can't accomplish this in their apps, how do you expect
+downstream to do it?
+
+-- 
+Ahmad Samir
+