Re: [Trisquel-users] Why is Ubuntu Web Browser in the repository?

[onpon4]

If that's a problem, and I tend to agree that it is, then not sending people  
to Google is not the solution. After all, almost the entirety of the Web has  
proprietary JavaScript on it, even if it's optional, and every modern Web  
browser executes that JavaScript code automatically. Let's take a common  
sense look at this: do you really think that people are going on the Web to  
look at Web pages with no proprietary JavaScript on them? No Google, no  
message boards, no YouTube, no news? No. That's an absurd expectation. People  
are going to websites they already know about that send them nonfree  
JavaScript code regardless of what websites the browser points them to. If  
anything, some users are probably deleting all bookmarks set up by default,  
changing the homepage to their preferred search engine, and adding bookmarks  
to the sites they know they frequent.

If we actually want to solve this problem, there's only one good solution:  
turn off JavaScript support in all supplied browsers (and other programs that  
read Web pages downloaded across the Internet). Give the user a browser that  
doesn't interpret JavaScript (by default; the option can be hidden in  
about:config or in the options menu with a warning), and explain to them that  
if a website doesn't work, it's because it doesn't support a libre Web  
browser. I would actually be very much in favor of this, because GNU FSDG is  
supposed to present an ideal operating system, and that isn't actually the  
case. Any new Trisquel user is running proprietary software every day in  
Abrowser, and I'd bet some of them don't even know it.