Fedora 23~25 Might Switch Away From Firefox

While no imminent switch is planned, Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution in a few releases may move away from Mozilla Firefox as the default web browser.

Nothing is set in stone right now, but around Fedora 23 to 25 is when there might be a browser shake-up in the Fedora camp. The new default web browser isn't looking to be Google's Chromium as a lot of people might be guessing now, but rather the GNOME Web Browser -- Epiphany.

In a Fedora mailing list thread about some being upset that Mozilla's Firefox web-browser is now offering "advertisement" on the start page of new tabs, Michael Catanzaro of Fedora and GNOME wrote:

We're working hard on WebKitGTK+ (and by extension Epiphany, which,
needless to say, will not run ads on the new tab page :) and it will be ready to replace Firefox as the default in Workstation soon, hopefully in the F23-F25 time scale, at which time I hope it will be considered for that role. But it's not yet good enough, and users won't like it if we switch before it is.

Midori does not securely handle unverified TLS certificates, so it's not safe to use for HTTPS. It's not even worth considering until that's fixed.

We should stick with Firefox for the time being, and simply disable the ad feature one way or another.

He's hoping that the WebKitGTK+ powered Epiphany will be ready for Fedora in two to four releases from now -- or another one to two years. Meanwhile on the aforementioned mailing list thread this weekend are some users calling for action now over being upset that Mozilla is bundling advertisements within their open-source browser... We'll see what happens; stay tuned to Phoronix.