On Fri, 2020-11-27 at 20:57 +0100, Syds Bearda wrote:
Hi Dario,
Hi!
Really good point.
Well, thanks. Ah, FTR, when I said in my email "someone on telegram suggested Chromium", that was Syds here. :-)
I see 5 options: 1) installing extensions from within Gnome Software 2) adding a browser for extensions 3) adding a striped down browser for extensions, that is called 'gnome extension browser' 4) firefox flatpak gets the ability to install extensions 5) not including a browser
My preferred solution would be an add-in for Gnome Software, but as that's not possible at the moment i think adding a browser is pretty useful. Only problem i have with that is that the browser is not really useful for codec related browsing, that's for both Firefox and Chromium.
I install chromium in my setup as that's a browser i don't use and i can abuse it for just installing gnome extensions. But I'm sure most users would actually keep using it.
So if option 3 or 4 would work, that's okay as well.
Yes, so, basically, if we ship with Chromium pre-installed, users can use it for installing GNOME extensions, without having to modify the system with `transactiona-update`. This makes our base image bigger, and results in some duplication (i.e., 2 browsers) if afterwards the user also install the Flatpak Firefox. But I think the benefit of _not_having_to_ start fiddling with `transactional-update` *immediately* after finishing installing the system may make it worth paying such a price. After that, the user can of course stick to Chromium if she wants. And maybe add Packman and install codecs in a `trasactional-update shell` and stay on it (Chromium) indefinitely, if she so desires. Or she can just install Flatpak Firefox and forget about Chromium, and go back to it only for installing extensions (as you're doing yourself, IIUC).
For option 3 we need a maintainer for creating a stripped down version of for example chromium or firefox for just extensions.
And for option 4 we need to add flathub as a repo (if we want to use flathub as the preferred flatpak repo), add the firefox browser and hack the flatpak version to get out of its sandbox. And if we add firefox as a flatpak, we could also just install some other flatpaks for office, email, music, photos and videos for example.
Everyone can do whatever pleases him the most, of course. However,
installing *all* apps as Flatpak (and, for now, that means via Flathub)
is what we recommend, what we tell people to do in talks and what we
(will?) document. So, sure, it makes sense to pick the browser from
there as well.
That's why we're extremely lucky that a Flatpak for a browser, with all
the needed codec there already (or being automatically downloaded, for
what matters) is available these days. And that's Firefox... In fact,
I've tested quite a few other browsers available on Flathub, and not
surprisingly, none of them except Firefox does that.
In fact this, as I was saying to Neal in my other email, means that a
good chunk of our users may never have to fiddle with Packamn in a
`transactional-update shell`.
There will probably be Flatpacks for Chromium/Chrome soon (Frederic one
showed me the link of where they're working on that... I'll post it
here if I find it again), but it's not there yet.
Therefore, Flatpak Firefox is something I cherish truly and deeply,
these days, and I don't want to give up on that. :-)
That being said, any effort toward implementing any other --and
probably even more suitable-- long term solution is certainly not
wasted and, of course, absolutely welcome!
Thanks and Regards
--
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D
http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Virtualization Software Engineer
SUSE Labs, SUSE https://www.suse.com/
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