Epiphany should depend on libxul instead of Firefox

[pulp]

Binary package hint: epiphany-browser

Epiphany is gaining more and more momentum, so it shouldn't depend on Firefox anymore but on libxul, like in Debian.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. The default browser on Ubuntu is firefox which is actively maintained, xulrunner is to universe. To build epiphany with xulrunner we would have to promote it to main which would mean lot of extra work. Since building with firefox or xulrunner makes almost no difference for the user we will not do the change, closing the request

[pulp (pulp)]

Then why not just move Epiphany to universe?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Epiphany is an official GNOME module and supported officially so it's available to main. Why do you think that a xulrunner build would be better?

[pulp (pulp)]

Well, considering some emerging programs like for example Joost, Democracy & Songbird, xulrunner will be an integral part of the forthcoming multimedia portion of the desktop, so it would streamline the base of a consistent desktop system, when Epiphany and FF were being built against xulrunner (although I do not know if FF and Joost for example could depend on the very same xul package)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

those programs could use firefox also, no?

[pulp (pulp)]

I'm sure they could, but thats not an fair argument, as the reason for filing this bug was to get rid of th firefox dependency.
But be that as it may, let's assume, that this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=93219 is a representative sample and let's assume mr. Shuttleworth was right, when estimating the userbase of Ubuntu at about 10 million people. You could make 2.6 million people a little bit happier, save some bandwidth (imagine those 2.6 mio. people doing 10 firefox updates during the next LTS lifecycle).

I just like my system clean and free of redundancy. Letting one browser (the standard GNOME browser, as you will know) depend on another one is redundant, in my opinion. The less bloat, the better, no?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The default browser is firefox at the moment so it has to be on the CD. To build GNOME with xulrunner we would have to add it to the CD which means having to remove something else. I think users like better to have extra applications available rather than firefox and xulrunner.
You would have to update 10 times xulrunner as well and it would not make a real bandwith difference for those users. It would mean that the majority of users would have to install the firefox updates and the xulrunner ones as well though and that the distribution team would have to have the extra xulrunner work.

[pulp (pulp)]

Yes, I know, what you want to tell me, but wouldn't the maintenance efforts of you developers just be exchanged from firefox to xul? I don't know if the bugs are happening in FF or Gecko, so for now I just have to believe you, that changing the dependency for Epiphany would be unreasonable but as the whole thing wasn't about changing the default browser, because for this purpose firefox is just fine, the actual size of the CD should not differ that much, as FF compiled against XUL shouldn't result in a much bigger size than now.

Anyway, at the moment our views seem to differ too much, so thanks for your time and energy.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That's not that we don't agree that using xulrunner would be nice, technically it's not easy to do though. Firefox is well known by linux and windows users and most users want to use it so it's going to be used. Building it with xulrunner would be lot of extra work and divert from upstream which means we could not send backs bugs to them. The space change is not worth the work