Herman Bos open source guerilla

Shipping Epiphany or Firefox by default

I just read roozbez's explaination on planet GNOME to why Sharif Linux shipped Firefox by default instead of Epiphany. The most important reason was marketing. Firefox is well known in the computer savvy user arena and ofcourse this is an advantage. But does it really matter?

First of all from what I understand Mozilla doesn't allow custom builds of their products to use the official branding. In this case the whole "user recognizes the logo argument" is void. It basicly cancels out most of the branding advantage besides that you can put on your website you ship Firefox. Not really impressive.

Then secondly how well known is Firefox really? My guess is that only a few procent of the actual computer users knows about it. My experience is a really high percentage of end users have no idea what it is and small percentage associates it with "a browser". A person who actually responds enthausiasticly when mentioning Firefox still has to pop up.

Ofcourse I'm not talking about my friends here who actively use Linux or who study computer sciences. I'm talking about real end users.

I think if you ship a Linux distribution that is aimed at the tech savvy it is probably the best choice by default. But this audience is same as the one that customizes their environment immediatly after install right?

So what would be the case if you ship a distribution for the general crowd or for rollout in a organization? Or what is really important anyway?

• The most important criteria is that it works. Websites should work and look the way they suppose to. For this criteria it doesn't matter if you use Epiphany or Firefox, they both use the Gecko engine to render webpages. So lets move on.

• The user experience! Is the graphical interface easy and friendly? Or confusing? In my opinion both interfaces are acceptable. However Epiphany is obviously the winner here. It just makes more sense and the interface is clean (no clutter as in Firefox).

• Consistancy and Integration! Although there are many afforts to integrate Firefox more in GNOME its just not it (really happy that it uses the GNOME filechooser in Ubuntu though!). To me Firefox doesn't feel part of the desktop for the end user its just less obvious.

• Features. Firefox is (over)loaded with features. Epiphany is really simple and elegant. You want some extra feature? Switch it on in the extension dialog. Another advantage about the Epiphany approach is that you actually know what features exist. Firefox pushes more and more features every release but I don't know about them and I certainly don't use them. The term bloatware comes to mind.

To be clear I don't think Ubuntu should switch to Epiphany (at least not now). Although I hope that it will in the future. I think Epiphany should become more populair first to justify such a switch. If you switch default browsers you simple piss off a lot of people.

I blogged about this because I don't agree or am not impressed with the common reasons to ship Firefox. Although I do believe that "just because its the most popular available" is a valid reason (would you ship Internet Explorer by default if it was opensource?).

About the branding: I think the only branding that matters is the distribution. What do you use? "I use Ubuntu!".

I really recommend you to give Epiphany a try. I predict you will get to hang of it really quickly and just love it. Personally I love the way bookmarking is handled (much better then in Firefox ).

Link: Why you should try Epiphany as your default browser with GNOME 2.14

ps: sudo apt-get install epiphany-browserÂ