I believe Firefox shouldn’t be removed, but it’s somehow a bit too heavy for old PCs. For those of us with older machines, Falkon runs much, much better while still being based on a solid foundation and making us able to enjoy the modern internet. I’d appreciate if the Lubuntu devs gave it a thought. Plus, it’s Qt, so some library sharing advantages may come into play there…
This comes independently on the snap vs deb topic.
We actually considered swapping Falkon in as the default browser instead of Firefox during the development of Kinetic. I don’t know what came of that plan, but personally I’m hoping for that to happen. We’re slightly drowning in projects at the moment, but hopefully we’ll revisit this at some point.
Why do you think that Falkon is based on a solid foundation?
Falkon is based on QtWebEngine. From QtWebEngine - Qt Wiki
After a release some bug fixes and security patches are backported.
For example in Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop 10 security fixes were announced. Which of them is fixed in Falkon?
It id my understanding that the engine is similar to Chromium’s, although they take their time to put it up to date.
However, I believe if Falkon is snapped, the security concerns would be less concerning.
As I said, it doesn’t have to be deb (though that’d be preferable to let the libraries be shared).
Firefox can be tweaked to be a lot more lightweight. The knobs to turn would depend on what your chokepoint is (RAM, processor, HDD, etc)
I don’t think you can to the same extent you can with Falkon. At least not with the default build.