I'm just curious, and some of my friends too. Personally I think "chromium-browser" is better (faster, less crashing) than "firefox", and, why Ubuntu not shipped with more than 1 web browser?
Why Ubuntu Includes Firefox Browser
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Related Solutions
In a Linux distribution, software doesn't usually use its own internal "automatic update" mechanism. Instead, it relies on the distribution to update it.
This is the case for both Firefox and Chromium supplied with Ubuntu.
The interesting thing here is that Firefox and Chromium have a different level of support from Canonical, and also that Firefox on Ubuntu has a somewhat unusual release strategy.
Firefox is included in Ubuntu's main repository, whereas Chromium is in the universe repository. This means that Ubuntu's version of Firefox receives the best level of support directly from Canonical, whereas Chromium's support relies on the Ubuntu community. Most packages in universe rely heavily on the work of Debian developers, and Debian has different priorities. So, based on this you would expect Firefox to include more Ubuntu-specific customisation, and to be better supported with updates.
The thing is, almost all software in a stable-release distribution (like Ubuntu, and most other distributions other that the "rolling release" ones) should not receive updates to new versions of software during the life cycle of that version of the distribution. At best, it should receive only minor updates or security patches. Firefox on Ubuntu is somewhat unusual here, because Ubuntu are providing full major new upstream versions of Firefox to their stable distributions.
The justification for this will be Firefox's rapid release strategy, which ensures that "major" releases are actually somewhat less disruptive than most software's major releases, but also makes it quite hard to backport security patches to older versions. So Canonical has obviously decided just to give Ubuntu the new upstream version than patch the old version.
For Chromium, it's not completely like this, but looks can be deceiving. Chromium on Ubuntu sometimes does get new upstream releases (which is why even Lucid is on a v18.x), and other times the Ubuntu community patch the existing version with fixes and security updates, but don't increment its version number. However, this means that despite the version number of Chromium in Ubuntu, it still includes some of the fixes that newer versions of Chromium have.
Web Browser was originally designed for use with Ubuntu Touch and was specially designed to be used with touch screen devices. Canonical has plans to end its investment in Ubuntu Touch in 2017, but the Web Browser app (webbrowser-app) is installed by default in Ubuntu 14.04-17.04.
Web Browser has very limited functionality compared to Firefox. It does not have a built-in master password feature and does not play YouTube videos properly. At least Web Browser can save bookmarks by clicking the star in the URL field on the right side, and Web Browser can also access Bookmarks, History, Private Mode and Settings by clicking on the three horizontal lines icon in the upper right corner as shown in the below screenshot. The only thing I could think of to use Web Browser for is for websites that require disabling adblocking, but Web Browser can't be used for that either because it doesn't even support solving Captcha riddles.
Best Answer
From an interview in 2011:
So... it is up for discussion (as are all other default packages) with every release that is not LTS. This time around Firefox wins. Maybe next release it will be Chromium.
Ubuntu ships with at least 10 browsers: you can find them in Ubuntu Software Center. There is of course only 1 default browser and as such only 1 is installed directly. In our case Firefox but you are seconds away from installing another one.