I understand the sentiment Chris, but I actually like the way the plug-in
architecture support the old school UNIX philosophy; many small tools which
each do one thing, and do it well. A swiss-army-knife plug-in that tries to
do everything is not necessarily an improvement, and building in lots of
bells and whistles has lead to FireFox becoming bloated, which is ironic
considering it began as a solution to the bloat of the SeaMonkey suite. Not
that privacy/ security functions are bells and whistles, I agree they are
important. But for example I'd like to see LibreJS functions included by
default in any free code browser worth of the name, but until the project is
more mature (both the client-side software and the server-side compliance),
it's better to keep it as a discreet plug-in which can be installed/ removed
and enabled/ disabled separately from other functions.
That said, I would like to see a 100% libre, cross-platform browser (on as
many desktop and mobile platforms as possible), under a unified branding,
since Firefox no longer really qualifies (EME, TokBox Hello etc etc).
Cross-platform apps don't solve the problem of non-free OS, but they do make
the transition to a free OS easier, because at least part of the UI will be
familiar. The browser is a key app to make cross-platform, because people
spend so much of their time using it.
One possible candidate is Dooble, has anyone else checked that out? I must
admit I'm a little dubious of projects still hosted on SourceForge, after all
the adware and non-free bundling scandals, but Dooble seems legit and
released a new version recently:
http://dooble.sourceforge.net/
