[vox] Iceweasel

[Orson Jones]

> On Fri 19 Jan 07,  9:55 AM, Bob Scofield <scofield at omsoft.com> said:
> > I was looking forward to Firefox 2.0, and today Apt said it was going to 
> > download it.  But voila, out came Iceweasel.

<snip>

> Yeah.  This is Debian's double edged sword.

<snip>

> AFAIK (and I only did a perfunctory reading myself), Iceweasel is
> functionally equivalent to Firefox.  The only difference is in the name and
> some graphics/labeling.

That is correct. You may have noticed in the past that Firefox didn't have the official logo. (blue with the fox going around it) Instead it had just a blue world thing. This was because the license for the firefox logo is more restricted than the rest of the software. Because Debian tries very hard to get the licensing stuff straight, they left the logo out. However the Firefox people didn't like the idea of the name being used without the logo. So the Debian people switched names and made a new logo to match.

So whenever the Mozilla team releases a new version of Firefox, the Debian maintainer takes it and makes a few changes and puts it in the Debian repository. (Don't get too hyped up about the changes, it is free software after all. They mostly make it work better in the Debian environment. Ex.: Disabling the automatic update functionality would defeat the purpose of apt which we love so much. Those kind of changes.) So now, they just added sed -e s/Firefox/Iceweasel/g to their routine.

I was hoping it wouldn't come out so long winded, but oh well.

Orson