Bug#889912: Please do not force chrome-gnome-shell / browser integration

[Jeremy Bicha]

On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org> wrote:
> That the equivs package works so well, makes a pretty good case to me
> that the chrome-gnome-shell should be brought in by a Recommends: rather
> than a Depends:

Thank you for taking the time to file this bug and help make Debian
better. Let me provide a bit of background:

One of GNOME 3's most popular and iconic features since the beginning
has been GNOME Shell Extensions. Traditionally, users have been able
to manage extensions (install, uninstall, change extension settings)
by visiting https://extensions.gnome.org/ via Firefox. GNOME Shell
itself included a Firefox addon to help this work.

But then Google pushed browsers to stop supporting NPAPI extensions.
GNOME Shell's addon will stop working whenever users upgrade past
Firefox 52 ESR (either already if they're using non-ESR builds or in a
few months when Firefox 60 ESR is pushed to everyone).

Therefore, Debian GNOME intentionally installs chrome-gnome-shell in
Debian 9 "Stretch" by default to prevent a regression from reaching
Debian Stable users who expect to be able to use
https://extensions.gnome.org/ like they always have been able to.
(Despite the name, chrome-gnome-shell supports Firefox and other
browsers too.)

However, as of GNOME 3.26, I believe GNOME upstream prefers users to
install and uninstall extensions from the GNOME Software app and
manage them with the GNOME Tweaks app. Since those apps are already
pre-installed for users of the 'gnome' metapackage, I think we can
lower the dependency in Debian Testing now.

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha