On Fri, 2019-10-25 at 11:15 +0200, François Téchené wrote:
Hi,
On 10/25/19 12:23 AM, Jeremiah C. Foster wrote:
I think that our overall focus has shifted somewhat out of necessity. I think that we focus our efforts a bit lower on the stack as it were, on the Window Manager, Mesa, kernel, BIOS, and even at the hardware level. That is where Purism I think has had the largest impact and where the company differentiates itself from comptetitors. On the software side higher up in the stack, things like PureBrowser take a great deal of effort as you know better than anyone. The effort, especially recently, doesn't seem to be appreciated upstream. When I discussed our changes and our motivations for the changes with Mozilla, they were uninterested in our use case. Also, as we've seen, they make lots of changes which are disruptive to users regardless of whether we rip them out or keep them.
While Epiphany is not in the same place as Firefox in terms of features and usability, we are investing more time and effort there. I think it is time to make the switch.
I agree with that.
The idea is to make a consistent experience between the phone and the laptops. Epiphany is not mature enough yet and needs to be improved but it is already in a state where it can be used on a daily basis.
I made the experience of having Mathilde, my wife, who is not technical at all, to use Epiphany for a couple of weeks on my Librem 15 and she hasn't complained much so far (only about having to adapt to the new UI).
To me, now is the right time to make the switch, as our user base is not too significant. It may change when the phone will get to mass production in a few months.
There will be some unhappy users of course but I think that it is what will push us to invest in Epiphany the right way, to make them happy again. This investment has already started with the development of the phone and now we need to push this software to compete with Firefox and Chrome. This will never happen if nobody uses it.
Thanks Francois - valuable input. Some of this information I'm going to use in the blog post announcing the move. :-)
Also, there's a security issue with the upstream code I've been informed via the Debian Security mailing list and Jonas: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/firefox-esr
This is going to be a focus in the near term.
Regards,
Jeremiah