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Have you heard of the browser Iceweasel? Do you know what a fork of Firefox, or why? Well, in this post I explain a bit of that, and the basic difference between the two browsers. |
What is Iceweasel?
Iceweasel is a fork of Mozilla Firefox compiled and used in Debian, distro that according to its philosophy of free operating system, does not use the trademarks of Firefox. The name of this browser is the antithesis of the literal translation of Firefox, Fire Fox (although in reality, Firefox is one of the names given to the red panda -ailurus fulgens- in English): Iceweasel, Ice Weasel.
Why two builds?
The Mozilla Foundation is the owner of the trademark Firefox, and does not allow the use of its name and other brands, such as its logo, in unofficial builds. Because the logo of Firefox It is licensed under a proprietary license, this browser could not be included in the official repositories of the distro. By replacing the official graphics with others with a free license, Mozilla withdrew permission to use name Firefox, and that is why this fork was created, to meet the requirements of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Additionally, additional security improvements were incorporated, following the security updates policy of Debian.
As well as Iceweasel, there are also forks of seamonkey, Thunderbird y Sunbird: icepee, icedove y iceowl respectively.
MPL and GPL
One of the big differences between Iceweasel y Firefox it's your license. The first one has a license LPG, and the second, a MPL.
The GPL is the General Public License GNU, created by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for free software, and is of type Copyleft; while the MPL is a license originally developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, and later transferred to the Mozilla Foundation, and is used to cover open source software, and free software, but allows a non-free reuse of the software, that is, it does not have a strong copyleft. It is also listed as incompatible with the GPL, and the FSF does not recommend its use.
In this article you can read a little more about definitions of free software.
Keeping Iceweasel up to date
Versions of Iceweasel y Firefox they are almost on par in their development. On the page of Debian Mozilla Team, they can choose which version of Iceweasel they want to have, and for which version of Debian. They can even find the version Aurora of Iceweasel, which, as in Firefox, seeks to be a middle point between the instability of the version Minefield (alpha) and the betas that take time to receive updates.
For example, to use Iceweasel 5.0 in debian wheezy, I have to add the following line to my / Etc / apt / sources.list:
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-5.0
Then add the gpg key for authentication
$ wget -O- -q http://mozilla.debian.net/archive.asc | gpg --import
$ gpg --check-sigs --fingerprint --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg 06C4AE2A
$ gpg --export -a 06C4AE2A | sudo apt-key add -
And finally, update and install Iceweasel
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install iceweasel
And just in a few minutes, they may be using different versions of Iceweasel
Is there a way to install it on another distribution? Fedora, for example. I used iceweasel on debian and I loved it. It worked very fast and without any ads
only the name is a trademark? because as far as I understood firefox was open source.
A fact that some may not know is that the firefox icon is not a fox, it is a panda.
In English the panda is called firefox.
Best regards
Thanks for the tip and for your work here, I will try to use ice Iceweasel in Ubuntu and Archlinux, I am still not able to use GNU HURD.
How can I install it on Kubuntu or is it only for Debian?
I receive your newsletters «desde linux» in my email, in the Ubuntu that just died along with the crunchbang, because the last time I tried to access the PC a black page appeared that said "read error" and from there I don't know what to do... not before either but I gave hope
And Debian mate is much more difficult, Konqueror tells me that it is an unknown machine, that it closed badly and that I have no connection and if I have
Obviously I need to know some basic, specific things, because the info makes me sleep
I hope I do not remain incommunicado, the technicians only attend linux
If I receive basic and simple information on how to get out of the quagmire and what to never do, I can post it on some Facebook pages
Thank you
masmola iceweasel
I did not know of its existence, now that I am testing Debian 8, I'm doing excellent, I notice this lighter browser.
Excellent contribution!
Apparently one of the main points in favor of IceWeasel is that it has no problem playing videos from youtube, yahoo or other video sites on Linux platforms.
With mozilla firefox on linux it is necessary to add the HTML5 extension that only has an effect on youtube and install flashplayer to see the videos of other pages and to open the bank pages.