The Internet browser from Mozilla will stay, for now

Nov 17, 2014 19:13 GMT  ·  By

The Firefox browser has been a part of the Fedora project for a very long time, but now the developers are discussing whether to remove it from the distribution entirely.

The Mozilla Foundation will display ads in the Firefox browser and this particular "feature" doesn't sit well with the Fedora community. Developers are thinking about removing the browser entirely and replace it with something else, but they are not there yet. This kind of forced advertising won't be looked upon with kindness by the Linux community, but luckily there are some alternatives.

"Showing ads does not make Firefox nonfree. The only reason we should completely remove Firefox from Fedora is if it starts shipping nonfree or patent-encumbered code -- like the Cisco binary that just recently got removed, or that EME module from Adobe that they're planning to include -- in such a way that is difficult or impossible to strip out. We should stick with Firefox for the time being, and simply disable the ad feature one way or another," said Michael Catanzaro in a message on the Fedora mailing list.

There are some options like Midori or Epiphany, but they are not ready for this task, at least not now. The plan would be to phase out Firefox and adopt something else, preferably after Fedora 23, which means probably another year and a half.

So, Fedora users will have to be content with the Firefox ad-powered version of the browser for now. The upcoming Fedora 21 is almost here and it will arrive in about a month.

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