On 3 October 2010 20:19, Richard Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > > > But are we always knowledgeable enough to be able to set up the system to > use our choice? > > I confess to being a Mandriva Linux user for only 10 years but I have been > an Opera user (and purchaser) for a year or two before that. I ALWAYS have > difficulty when removing Firefox and replacing it with Opera as I can NEVER > find all of the nooks and crannies of the system and various software > packages which presume that Firefox must be available. > > I would be much happier to discover that a distribution had taken my > choices seriously enough to check with me during the install and then make > sure that my choice is properly and fully integrated. > > Then perhaps we could highlight applications which expect no other browser > than Firefox and proceed to educate their authors/packagers as to the > importance of user choices. > >> >> Majority of users do not want choice. >> > > OK, that may be true, but when one of that majority decides to broaden the > horizons of their browsing experience then will they magically be learned > enough to be able to fix all of the integration issues for themselves? I > suspect not. > > An install time selector screen and supporting scripts would be a very good > starting point for a "Change Default Browser" wizard, much as XFDrake tries > to hide the complexities of switching video drivers. > > Richard >
The point is, such scripts break all the time. e.g. chromium-browser has a "make chrome the default browser" button, the problem is, it works only under GNOME, but doesn't work under KDE4 or XFCE. It's using a variant of the xdg-utils scripts... xdg-utils is trying to do the huge job of working with all possible desktop environments, this is, by its very nature, a hard thing to accomplish. Firefox also has a "make firefox the default web browser", again it works only with GTK/GConf based applications, but it doesn't change KDE settings. If upstream can't accomplish this in their apps, how do you expect downstream to do it? -- Ahmad Samir
