iceweasel

Posted Jul 24, 2022 20:26 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Living with the Rust trademark

Really, Debian should have kept the name iceweasel. Dealing with trademark license is not worth the trouble of using them.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 25, 2022 6:07 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (11 responses)

Firefox is the only viable free-software browser, fragmenting it really won't help. Plus we really need an alternative to the chrome engine, which has even taken over Microsoft now.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 30, 2022 14:13 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Fragmenting a browser between Official and Free editions doesn't seem to have hindered Chromium's adoption. Both that and Firefox are "free software" in the most worthlessly pedantic sense too: I can, right now, burn a whole lot of CPU compiling either in Gentoo without manually permitting a single non-free license in the config.

I count 41 packages in the distro repos that link against webkit-gtk, 75 that use qtwebengine, ~20 distinct binaries built on chromium, one that uses *dillo*. You know what's not in that list? Servo. XULRunner. Firefox. We really need an alternative but Mitchell Baker's $4 million salary sure isn't making that happen.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 30, 2022 17:31 UTC (Sat) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (9 responses)

There are important differences between firefox and icecat (which might not be the same as iceweasel). Mozilla thinks it is OK for them to violate users' privacy because they are the good guys doing it for good reasons. The changes for icecat provide a significant improvement in privacy and I think people should use icecat in preference to firefox until Mozilla changes their stance on privacy.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 31, 2022 0:52 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (5 responses)

> Mozilla thinks it is OK for them to violate users' privacy

Source?

iceweasel

Posted Jul 31, 2022 5:18 UTC (Sun) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (4 responses)

Read https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/blob/master/user.js to get an idea of what could be improved. In some cases there is a trade off, in others Fitrefox just provides a poor default.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 31, 2022 11:19 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

Firefox can enhance defaults is probably always going to be true although newer versions typically do better there. However your statement that Mozilla thinks it’s ok to violate privacy isn’t supported by this.

iceweasel

Posted Aug 4, 2022 20:48 UTC (Thu) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (2 responses)

For something more explicit, they are open about having telemetry on by default. Which means unless you know what you are doing, you are compromised before you can even opt out using the normal settings interface.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

iceweasel

Posted Aug 5, 2022 5:27 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

"Compromised"? Care to explain why have you used such heavy word?

iceweasel

Posted Aug 5, 2022 13:51 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I read "compromised" as a technical term. If you are a dissident in an autocratic country that bans the use of Firefox and the government has the means to pinpoint you by the telemetry traffic, the *fact* is that you are effectively *dead* before you can opt-out.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 31, 2022 1:10 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

The last release of icecat was in 2019, version 60.7.0. Using icecat means ignoring over three years of security fixes. Security holes are somewhat more of a privacy risk than anything Mozilla does.

iceweasel

Posted Jul 31, 2022 5:01 UTC (Sun) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (1 responses)

That does not appear to be the case in Fedora. I don't know if it is a fork or if your information is out of date.
Name : icecat
Version : 91.12.0

iceweasel

Posted Jul 31, 2022 15:29 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> That does not appear to be the case in Fedora. I don't know if it is a fork or if your information is out of date.

His information is correct, the Fedora maintainer has his own fork because upstream is dead.

https://gitlab.com/anto.trande/icecat

You can find it by looking at the spec repo in

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/icecat