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I'm running Ubuntu with Gnome-shell. For reasons outside of this question, I needed to temporarily uninstall Firefox. I had no other browser installed at that time. On entering sudo apt-get remove firefox I was told that doing so would install about 100 packages, mainly associated with KDE. I aborted the command and installed Epiphany; then I was able to remove Firefox without installing KDE.
I find this strange. Apparently Ubuntu wants me to have at least one browser installed (why?) and if I don't, it wants me to install all (or most) of KDE. How does this work? If it is absolutely necessary to have a browser, why not suggest Epiphany?
This is Ubuntu 13.04 with Gnome 3.8 added. It is not a clean install of Ubuntu Gnome but I have certainly never installed KDE.

Jos
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    Please refer to http://askubuntu.com/questions/11934/why-does-removing-firefox-install-another-browser?rq=1 – JoshStrobl May 01 '13 at 12:11
  • You may not have knowingly installed KDE itself but you may have, at one time or the other, installed an app that required, and thus pulled in, KDE dependencies. As for why a browser is required, the link in the comment above has the basis. –  May 01 '13 at 12:24
  • Thanks to both of you. This answers half of my question (that there is a dependency on "any browser") - but not why a KDE-based browser would be the logical choice. – Jos May 01 '13 at 12:30
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    Just tested this with a fresh install of 13.04 apt-get -s remove firefox The -s makes this a simulation so it doesn't actually change anything. This suggested that running the command for real sudo apt-get remove firefox would remove 6 packages and would not install any. We would need to know more about your system to understand why it wants to install lots of KDE packages – Warren Hill May 01 '13 at 14:35

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