We don't have Chrome in Fedora so this leaves Firefox.
As long as there's no reliable data about how many users are
affected
by this issue IMHO the whole discussion is bulls**t.
Firefox and it's new policies are open to interpretation. It's debatable
whether add-on signing actually constitutes DRM or is something more like
what Fedora does with it's *.rpm packages and 'dnf' validating official GPG
keys from a single verified source. It's a thing that's meant to establish
trust. Most add-on packages used by Firefox users in Linux are the same as
those used by Windows/Mac users from the official Firefox extensions
web-site.
Most users won't notice the change and will probably benefit from the added
security. The web-browser has become the number one attack vector on the
desktop for Linux/Mac/Windows. This merely prevents a malicious add-on
from installing itself in the background or tricking the user into
installing it through a software bundle or clicking something a website.
This FESCo ticket should have really been about making Chromium available
from the official Fedora repositories. Google Chrome is the leading
browser currently [1] and growing. It's also default on the two leading
Linux distributions Chrome OS and Android. In a sense this forces users to
use the official Google Chrome packages and these ship with proprietary DRM
extensions and Flash which doesn't make sense.
Instead you should revise the ticket or file a new one and make this about
packaging Chromium so that Fedora users who make Chrome their default can
avoid having to use these proprietary schemes.
[1]
On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 12:00 PM, kendell clark <coffeekingms(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 01/11/2016 07:00 AM, Kalev Lember wrote:
> On 01/10/2016 11:29 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2016-01-07 at 14:26 +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>> there is currently a case against Firefox discussed in FESCo:
>>>
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1518
>>>
>>
>> We have many different opinions in this thread. Clearly, there is no
>> solution that will make everyone happy. I tried to formulate a
>> consensus position based on the comments in this thread, which I
>> suspect the majority of us can support:
>>
>> "Fedora Workstation prefers to ship the latest release of Firefox, not
>> ESR releases. Shipping an unbranded version of Firefox is acceptable to
>> us, but not ideal. Shipping a version of Firefox that blocks unsigned
>> extensions is also acceptable to us, but not ideal."
>>
>> In other words: we're fine with FESCo deciding for either unbranded or
>> locked-down Firefox, but we won't be very happy either way. Does this
>> seem fair?
>>
>
> My personal take on this is that we need to ship with a mainstream
> browser that is actively developed and that web sites support. These
> days, I think it's a choice between either Firefox or Chrome.
>
> We don't have Chrome in Fedora so this leaves Firefox.
>
> Also, shipping a browser with a widely recognizable name (Firefox) as
> opposed to shipping a minor fork (Icecat) has a huge benefit when it
> comes to people finding the web browser -- they will have used the same
> browser on other operating systems, making switching to Fedora easier.
>
> Habit plays a huge role. Take a familiar name away and it's suddenly
> much harder for us to compete.
>
> I think it would be fine to ask Firefox upstream to support additional
> trust chains to support locally packaged extensions, but if that fails I
> don't think we should go with anything as drastic as switching to an
> unbranded Firefox fork.
>
>
"I'll also add that the accessibility of those firefox forks is sometimes
not as good as and sometimes much worse than firefox itself. This isn't
always the case, but with icecat 24 for example, there were lots of little
things, orca not being able to track the focus, controlls not being
focusable, and when I brought them up to joanmeri I was told quite bruskly
to "just use firefox". I don't like chrome or chromium, and my main reason
for that is as I've said, google not talking to the assistive technology
API's available on whichever platform it's running on, instead expecting
you to download their own addon which somehow turns their internal
representations of webpages into spoken text, using their own tts voices,
instead of the system ones. In other words, I'm for sticking with firefox,
but I will keep going if we switch to a fork, I'll just have more bugs to
file.
Thanks
Kendell clark"
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