Thursday·27·October·2011
The World without a sage web browser? — or — Why Firefox sucks //at 22:57 //by abe
Although I read our Debian’s Joey’s blog posting about not being able to produce Mozilla security updates for Debian, only now, after reading about other Debian’s Joey’s try to fix a security hole in Debian’s Mozilla Firefox, I see how asshole-like the Mozilla Foundation’s security policy looks to Linux (and maybe other operating system’s) distributions, who favour stableness over feature richness.
As many know (or at least were forced to know ;-) I don’t like Firefox, because in spite of all the plugins it can’t cope with all the useful features of Galeon 1.2.x or Opera. That’s the UI point of view.
But from the political (correctness) point of view, we have to ask ourself: What sage browser does the open source world still have?
- Mozilla does not provide security patches, so Firefox, Mozilla (RIP), Epiphany and Galeon are no more acceptable for distribution use.
- Konqueror has planed to drop KHTML in favor of Mozillas Gecko. So see above.
- Dillo’s rendering engine is fast but not really state of the art. Same counts for glinks (aka “links -g”).
- Lynx, links and w3m somehow don’t count since the distributions (and sometimes, me too ;-) primarily need a graphical web browser.
But back to usaility: I heard from quite a few people — even open source people — evaluating or even already using Opera as an alternative, because there is no sage open source web browser, even if you don’t count Mozillas security policy. And I can understand them. If Galeon wouldn’t exist, I probably would be a convinced Opera on Debian user myself, although Opera is closed source. But I and many more can’t live without a working and sage web browser.
The only thing, I don’t like with Opera is that this company seems to
be (or at least was a few years ago) very chaotic and uncoordinated.
(And I really wonder, how they are able to produce such impressive
software.) But that’s another story…
Tagged as: Debian, FAIL, Firefox, Galeon, Lynx, Mozilla, Open Source, Opera, Other Blogs, RIP, Security, UI
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