Mark Shuttleworth, please, don't replace Firefox by Chromium

During the last Ubuntu Summit, Ubuntu developers asked themselves about replacing Firefox by Chromium as the default web browser of the distribution.

Mark, know that I like your OS. I am using Ubuntu since my first steps as a GNU/Linux user. It was Ubuntu 7.10. Since then, and even before, Firefox is my default browser and I have never changed either.

These last years, you started plenty of changes on my OS. Unity replacing Gnome, to bring new visual interface, and a more modern graphics manager. You started developing Mir to offer a unified graphics server to Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch. I understand and accept (fr) all of this changes because they improve the systm and give new tools to the open-source universe.

On the other side, replacing my default (and favorite) web browser by Chromium is not the best thing to do.

If this choice was made based on the stability or the ease to use, from my side, I see no major difference between this two browsers. Au contraire, I even think that, release after release, Firefox doesn't stop to improve itself and is becoming better than Chrome.

However, my arguments are not only based on technical considerations, but rather on a simple moral principle.

Beside Chrome, we find Google, a Mountain View company, that proposes many (open (or not) but not standard-compatible) free services. I am not an Anti-Google, but we must keep in mind that its first goal is to make money. And unfortunately, it does it with our personal data...

On the contrary, Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Foundation and a large community of developers. Mozilla is an organization that fight every day for a free Web, for the Open-Source and for the standards. Mozilla is also a great free project incubator, that allow everyone to take back the control of its own data. I could list from its major projects Persona, the decentralized and Open-Source authentication system, or the projects OpenBadges or WebMakers. It it is not enough, lat's talk about those things we can not do without on our web browser, and that were created by Mozilla, like Firebug, then the Developer Tools, the tab navigation, Bugzilla or the amazing add-ons catalog.

Like it was greatly said in the paper of geexxx.fr, the Mozilla Foundation can only live, mainly, thanks to the contract it has with Google to making Google the default search engine of Firefox. Mozilla needs users to keep making a better Web, to keep implementing standards, to keep making end users use free software, and to keep improving the way we entertained the Internets.

So, please Mark Shuttleworth, keep our Red Panda in Ubuntu, and don't succumb to the calls from Google, just because it has the biggest (usage proportion), Mozilla and Firefox deserves to be the default Web Browser of your (and also our) distribution !