Created attachment 188157 [details] [review]
Switch default browser to Epiphany

Another possibility would be to pick up the url handler values for http and mailto in gsettings and have the firefox/evolution icons change automatically (like the panel does in F14, at least for default browser).

(In reply to comment #2)
> Another possibility would be to pick up the url handler values for http and
> mailto in gsettings and have the firefox/evolution icons change automatically
> (like the panel does in F14, at least for default browser).

How would this work? We'd have some sort of magic string in the gconf key that was resolved to the web browser in the code? Does the URL handler value give us an application?

Review of attachment 188157 [details] [review]:

Practically speaking, doesn't make sense to me - it's just asking all distros to "fork" and patch this.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Review of attachment 188157 [details] [review]:
> 
> Practically speaking, doesn't make sense to me - it's just asking all distros
> to "fork" and patch this.

The GNOME upstream should follow GNOME decisions.  GNOME decided to use Epiphany.  

And really, how hard is it to patch the application list?

I *strongly* disagree with the resolution of this bug in that way.  It's disregarding the work of the release team and the rough consensus of the project.

(In reply to comment #6)
> I *strongly* disagree with the resolution of this bug in that way.  It's
> disregarding the work of the release team and the rough consensus of the
> project.

I rejected the patch, I didn't resolve the bug WONTFIX. Creating another separate patch point from the default browser just doesn't make sense to me.

(In reply to comment #7)
> (In reply to comment #6)
> > I *strongly* disagree with the resolution of this bug in that way.  It's
> > disregarding the work of the release team and the rough consensus of the
> > project.
> 
> I rejected the patch, I didn't resolve the bug WONTFIX. Creating another
> separate patch point from the default browser just doesn't make sense to me.

I don't think it's really cool to reject a patch (especially one so trivial and obviously correct) without also adding a concrete suggestion for doing it differently.   Are you thinking something like comment 2?

(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> > (In reply to comment #6)
> > > I *strongly* disagree with the resolution of this bug in that way.  It's
> > > disregarding the work of the release team and the rough consensus of the
> > > project.
> > 
> > I rejected the patch, I didn't resolve the bug WONTFIX. Creating another
> > separate patch point from the default browser just doesn't make sense to me.
> 
> I don't think it's really cool to reject a patch (especially one so trivial and
> obviously correct) without also adding a concrete suggestion for doing it
> differently.   Are you thinking something like comment 2?

I think that was a fairly obvious implication of my two comments.

(In reply to comment #2)
> Another possibility would be to pick up the url handler values for http and
> mailto in gsettings and have the firefox/evolution icons change automatically
> (like the panel does in F14, at least for default browser).

Last time I discussed something like this with Jon he was against "role based launchers" as opposed to app icons.

My opinion remains that:

For people making GNOME forks, it's pretty damn trivial to patch the list.

For people who want to use Firefox, we pretty desperately need to have some story for installing apps that doesn't suck.

FWIW Debian actually patches gnome-shell to use Epiphany instead, since they don't ship a file called mozilla-firefox.desktop and consider Epiphany the default browser for GNOME. 

mozilla-firefox.desktop is a Fedora-specific name as far as I know, since Mozilla doesn't ship .desktop files. Ubuntu seems to use firefox.desktop, Debian uses iceweasel, etc.

For reference: http://bugs.debian.org/553054

(In reply to comment #4)
> Review of attachment 188157 [details] [review]:
> 
> Practically speaking, doesn't make sense to me - it's just asking all distros
> to "fork" and patch this.

Well, only fedora seems to use the mozilla-firefox.desktop filename, so other distributions are patching already.

If you imply that most of the distributions switch to some other browser for ephy deficiencies, maybe the best response is to help improve it.
With the recent addition of web applications handling, ephy gained new insensitive for people to try it.

Epiphany developers are working on greatly integrating with the overall Gnome 3 experience. Something multi-platform solutions haven't the comfort to and don't really care.

At least, other gnome developers could help promoting and improving it.
Giving it a preeminent spot in the default dash would go in this direction.

The browser being the main entrypoint to data and logic nowadays and ephy being the only credible fully-GPL alternative, some more brain cycle and eyeballs would be greatly useful :)

Seeing as everyone (but Fedora) needs to patch the applications list already, I don't see why we shouldn't use that patch.

Another way would be to default to a "role based launcher", which would get replaced on first start (eg. if you have "browser" as a desktop name, replace it by the default handler for x-scheme-handler/http, which distros can already override in shared-mime-info's defaults.list).

(In reply to comment #13)
> Seeing as everyone (but Fedora) needs to patch the applications list already, I
> don't see why we shouldn't use that patch.

Well, Ubuntu works now too after 602862826105c4ac1424eefb0ead0d60a9386aef.

But I'm ready to patch Fedora to follow this historical Red Hat Linux decision, and I'll give the heads up to the Ubuntu people.

So...Owen?

Review of attachment 188157 [details] [review]:

Sure, go ahead

Attachment 188157 [details] pushed as 8c9eb67 - Switch default browser to Epiphany