Re: Firefox 52's end of life, packaging Chromium

[Amirouche Boubekki <amirouche.boubekki@gmail.com>]

Le jeu. 30 août 2018 à 00:35, Clément Lassieur <clement@lassieur.org> a écrit :
>
> Hi Amirouche,
>
> Thanks for your answer.
>
> Amirouche Boubekki <amirouche.boubekki@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Let's choose our battle wisely. I want to remind that the core of the
> > guix users are GNU followers and are also anything but pro web or pro
> > web browser or a variation of that. I don't say every GNU follower is
> > against the www.  It's not the core of potential guix users
>
> Guix does not target GNU followers.

Good news.

> It targets all users.  GNU
> followers are a very small part of them and they are not a problem
> because they usually find their way around.

Yes.

> The problem is all users
> that are not GNU followers (and some GNU followers like me) who need a
> modern browser.

Out of curiosity, please let us know what you need from the "modern browser"?

On my side, I need a debugger for doing web frontends.

> We definitely don't want to frighten them with our
> nostalgic ideas about how the web should be and how a browser should be.

I don't want to be rude at all, especially with who has been nice to me.
But following that kind of logic cannot always be a good way forward.

> They just want a browser that works.  As long as it's free software,
> let's not complicate things for them.

I agree. I am wondering what that browser make it the browser they want.

> Otherwise we'll never grow.

Sorry again to disagree. I don't think the future of guix is in the desktop.
It has been said that GNU/Linux will kill windows on the desktop for a decade.
It did not happen. Nowadays, people use their computer only to run a browser
whatever the OS... Given that, It seems to defy the de facto
definition of a modern
OS not to provide a "good enough" web experience.

Snap!

>
> > 1) What firefox or chromium are useful for comparing to other graphical
> > web browsers?
> >
> > 2) What will chromium bring to guix and guix developers that they
> > can't do otherwise?
> >
> > 3) What are the minimal features for a graphical web browser to be
> > useful for a guix developer?
>
> Today I needed to browse some sites, at work, and I couldn't do it with
> anything else than Firefox and Chromium.  I'm not alone.  Lots of people
> need to browse complicated sites that they don't know in advance.

> We don't want them to wonder, every time: is it going to work with the browser shipped with Guix?

Agreed.

Ok. I will try to help  with

a) chromium
b) investigate what people are expecting from a modern web browser
c) See whether qtwebkit is follows upstream security updates and test
it to see if it's stable
d) do the same with webkit-gtk