Hello,
So, I was giving some thoughts at the matter in the subject of this
email, and here's what I came up with.
Personally, I do use a few extensions; not that many, but a few. I also
don't think I have spoken with any GNOME user that has not needed
and/or installed at least one.
Therefore, I'd say it's quite important to have a way to install them,
ideally one that is available right after install, without having to
fiddle with and tweak the system.
Right now we're not shipping any browser. we were shipping Firefox, but
got rid of it, since there is a Flatpak. But the flatpak can't handle
the extensions.
The issue is known, is being debated and maybe will even be fixed at
some point. But that may take a while. Some links:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1633206
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621763
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/g2emg7/extensionsgnomeorg_firefox_fl...
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/firefox-flatpak-on-flathub-beta/17878...
The last one contains a workaround, but I don't see it as something
that we can easily (at some point) put in place like by default, or
document and expect users to understand and follow it, TBH.
As an alternative, there's this app, available as Flatpak, but it does
not handle the installing part of the extension workflow, so it's kind
of useless for the purposes of this discussion:
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Extensions
The only solution I currently see, is to do it from a browser installed
in the system, with RPMs. And on that ground, I think we should go back
and add one, by default.
This of course would apply to the GNOME flavor only. I mean, if we want
it in KDE too, for whatever other reason, I don't personally object or
anything, I just don't think it'd be necessary there.
Thoughts so far?
Well, it gets trickier. In fact, if you're tempted to say "Ok, let's go
back to including Firefox as an RPM by default", then think about this:
what happens if an user then try to use this version of Firefox that we
provide, for access multimedia content that requires the coded that we
don't ship and that (typically) are in packman?
Something like <