[conspire] (forw) Re: [Felton LUG] GNOME's Web Browser Ditches Google For DuckDuckGo | OMG! Ubuntu!

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 15:02:08 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: felton-lug at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Felton LUG] GNOME's Web Browser Ditches Google For DuckDuckGo |
	OMG! Ubuntu!
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Robert Lewis (bob.l.lewis at gmail.com):

> http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/08/gnome-switches-from-google-to-duckduckgo

For best privacy protection using DuckDuckGo, be sure to run with
NoScript so as to avoid running the Javascript for Google Analytics that
the search engine sends you.  (Enable the Javascript snippet from
DuckDuckGo itself, though.)

http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/adieu_google/

As GNOME's browser named 'Web' (formerly Epiphany) lacks XUL support
(being not based on Gecko or equivalent) and therefore cannot support
NoScript, IMO that's one of probably many reasons to eschew it.  And, so
far, nobody's bothering to fill that code hole:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=484861

I was actually a big fan of Epiphany's predecessor 'Galeon" back in the
late 1990s / early 2000s on account of its speed, low RAM footprint, and
stability compared to competing releases of Mozilla Navigator and
Konqueror.   Galeon around v. 1.2 was a terrific browser for its day.

But then two things happens, one bad, one good.  (1) Around 2002, lead
developer Marco Pesenti Gritti deliberately imposed GNOME disease on the
codebase:  Pursuant to GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines, Gritti
decreed that the 1.3 rewrite would radically reduced the number of
settable preferences and simplify the user interface.  Every other
Galeon coder disagrees, the project forked, and Gritti's surviving fork,
Epiphany, is the one with the GNOME brain damage.  (The other, more
reasonable fork was EOLed in 2006 as no longer tenable.[1])

(2) The (Mozilla) Gecko engine became a whole lot better _and_ the XUL
extensions interface became so useful as to be a winning feature.
Nothing approaches the privacy, security, and basic functional
capabilities of a Gecko-based browser, even if some of the competing
browser engines and glue code are better written otherwise.


[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120425230044/http://gnomedesktop.org/node/2450

-- 
Cheers,                HULK LIKE OXFORD COMMA VERY MUCH.  HULK WANT TO DATE, 
Rick Moen              BUT OXFORD COMMA ONLY GO OUT IN GROUPS OF THREE OR MORE. 
rick at linuxmafia.com                             -- @EditorHulk
McQ! (4x80)

----- End forwarded message -----