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Comment by aorth | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the Elementary team has been doing great work for years. Sad that it's all parallel to the efforts of the larger GNOME Desktop project. I don't know how much code gets shared between the two, but I cringe to think that Elementary is dragging along a suitcase full of patches! Some of their apps are forks, while others are written from scratch to fit their design (UI/UX/simplicity) goals. I think their decision to use what amounts to a random, third-party web browser (Midori) as the default is laughable (this day and age, would any security-conscious person NOT recommend Chrome?).

Nonetheless, bravo to the Elementary team for taking the time to even write up this blog post (which is apparently the first in a series).

Edit: replies pointed out that Epiphany is the default web browser. Point still stands that Chrome implements the most security mitigations out of ALL browsers on the market.

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> would any security-conscious person NOT recommend Chrome?

Would any security-conscious person DO recommend a browser made by an advertising company for datamining purposes?

Firefox is a much better choice for the privacy/security-aware individual.

But privacy != security. Chrome implements the most security mitigations compared to all other browsers.

Do you any source to back that up? This is the first time I hear something like that.

It's well known in the information security community for years. But here's a recent article on grading software security like how we grade cars:

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/29/a-famed-hacker-is-gradin...

They give one example (with a graph) of the security mitigations that are in popular web browsers:

https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20...

Firefox scored below Chrome and Safari in several areas: address space layout randomization (ASLR), heap protection, stack guards, fortified source. And I've even seen infosec people saying that Firefox has some of these, but doesn't even enable them on builds for some platforms!

Midori is not the default browser, it's Epiphany, as stated in the blog post. Besides, Chromium is available in the software store, and official Chrome is installable directly from Google.

Also, how is this any different than macOS shipping with Safari only, or Windows shipping with Edge only? You're holding an open source project to a higher standard than two highly successful commercial offerings.

> I think their decision to use what amounts to a random, third-party web browser (Midori) as the default is laughable

They switched to the default GNOME browser "Epiphany" in the latest release of elementary OS. But I agree, the first thing i did was install a different browser. In my case Firefox.

The version of Epiphany which has to ship with Ubuntu (because Ubuntu is only shipping GTK 3.18) is pretty outdated [1]. I have been trying to move away from Chrome to Epiphany slowly but was encountering quite a few issues which I reported to GNOME and they were like "Oh yeah, we fixed this a long time ago, get the latest version".

I got the latest version via flatpak and I've completely replaced Chrome. There are still a few issues to be ironed out in flatpak (like notifications and downloads support), but it's getting there!

[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/03/30/positive-progr...

Epiphany uses Webkit, and Gnome and Elementary are clearly emulating OSX. Also, unlike Chrome, Epiphany is well integrated with GTK3 apps - for example you can drag/drop text from Epiphany to Nautilus. And Firejail+Epiphany should be similar in terms of security.

Of course, Chrome is still better feature wise, however, Elementary or any other distribution would need Google's permission to distribute Chrome.

> Sad that it's all parallel to the efforts of the larger GNOME Desktop project.

That is why open source is still a thing: because of available choices.

Oh, definitely. Open-source software is awesome. I'm just saying it's a shame that they do such awesome work and have to keep it parallel, maintaining a ton of their own software (or suitcase full of patches) with their small team, compared to the GNOME team that has a much larger developer community.

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