[PureOS] Bits from PureOS | Sharks!

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

On Thu, 2019-10-24 at 19:25 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Jeremiah C. Foster (2019-10-24 18:40:53)
> > On Wed, 2019-10-23 at 13:19 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > > Quoting Jeremiah C. Foster (2019-07-29 02:33:16)
> > > > Discussion with various folks has led us to cease maintaining 
> > > > PureBrowser.
> > > 
> > > Did we really "cease maintaining PureBrowser" already?
> > 
> > No. The blocker is;
> > 
> > 1. A blog post holding the announcement of EoL for PB
> > 2. Consensus from the maintainer (that's you!) of PB that this is
> > what 
> > we're going to do
> > 
> > I'm happy to write the blog post. How do you feel ending the PB
> > fork
> > maintenance?
> 
> Thanks, I'd appreciate if you wrote the blog post.

Will do!

> If I were to decide, then I would wanna end PureBrowser fork *now* 
> before next release expected in few weeks, and expected to
> reintroduce 
> Mozilla- and Google-promoting stuff currently ripped out.

Agreed. This seems like good timing.

> To clarify, I do *not* imply that I consider Epiphany mature enough
> to 
> fully replace PureBrowser: I expect some users to continue to need a 
> Mozilla-based (or Chromium-based) browser.

I think you're likely right here.

> I expect users to be grumpy no matter if we drop PureBrowser or keep
> it.

I expect you're likely correct.

> But am I really the one to decide here?

As the maintainer I think you have a key perspective, yes.

>   PureBrowser has been promoted 
> as something estraordinary in PureOS, cemented by glueing a couple 
> addons to it.  My judgement here does not take that into account.

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. 

Best,

Jeremiah
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