[Mageia-dev] Talk of Browsers

[Ahmad Samir]

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