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Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), publisher of Debian™ GNU/Linux and Debian™ GNU/kFreeBSD™ has reached an agreement in its longstanding trade dress dispute with the Mozilla Corporation, publisher of the Firefox application suite. Under the agreement, SPI will pay an undisclosed sum to the Mozilla Corp. and periodically turn over marketing data regarding SPI's customers. In exchange, SPI will receive a nonexclusive license to distribute the Firefox suite as part of SPI's Debian™ products.
SPI agreed not to alter the branding of the Firefox suite; not to disable its Pocket integration; not to alter the suite's anti-phishing or search features, which are sponsored by Mozilla Corp. partners; and to discontinue its competing Iceweasel Web suite, which is based on Mozilla Corp. software licensed under a previous accord. The Firefox suite will be provided to SPI's Debian™ customers as an automatic update via the firm's Dpkg℠ service. The updates will go out over the course of the next three months to groups of randomly selected customers, in order to provide what SPI calls "a superior upgrade experience."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:16PM
So did I. I wonder what this means for Devuan's use of Debian's iceweasel.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:25PM
I would imagine they would continue as before, but would have to maintain the package themselves if they want it. The original reason for the rename to iceweasel was due to lack of agreement between Debian and Mozilla. As Devuan still does not have an agreement with Mozilla, they can continue as before.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:40PM
Devuan Jessie isn't published yet, so whatever happens will take a while to unfold.
AFAIK, "SPI" is the "legal entity" associated with Debian, so they probably own the trademark right on "iceweasel browser".
If SPI demands that Devuan stops distributing iceweasel, that would be .. odd ..
Maybe we could re-brand it "lightning wolverine [wikipedia.org]" and still be in the clear, legally.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:45PM
It really is a lot of faff for a browser that has only been going downhill in the last few years (IMO). Perhaps it is time to have another default browser for Devuan? (and other Linux distro's).
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:48PM
Any suggestions? I'm just used to iceweasel.
A browser that doesn't puke up in enforcing mode would also be nice to have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:53PM
Currently HTML 4.01 with CSS 2.1 support and duktape as the javascript engine, written entirely in C.
It is lacking in all the hooks needed for modern browser privacy, but is a much smaller and cleaner codebase to work from (the entire source tree is 3-6 megs), it supports tabs, can run in ~64-96 megs of ram, and can probably render SN just fine (I have only tried it with the green site, trying to find out how well it tolerates modern JS sites.)
netsurf-browser.org
Go check it out!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:21PM
Then it's not a viable replacement for Firefox.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 02 2016, @09:12PM
I just switched from Chrome to iceweasel because Google dropped support for chrome. I'm not sure why they did this. Perhaps it got so bloated that a 32-bit address space wasn't enough any more?
I tried switching to Midori but had a few problems with it.
(1) I couldn't figure out how to transfer my bookmarks.
(2) When I used it to look at my own filesystem (using file://) it did not alphabetise my directory listings. It took forever for me to find specific files there. I don't even care much about which alphabetical order they use.
Now maybe there re easy fixes for these problems, but I couldn't find them. Nor could I find a user-support mailing list, where users could help each other and the solutions would stay around in archives.
Otherwise, Midori seems a pleasant enough browser.
I managed to get my bookmarks transferred to iceweasel.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:32PM
I don't know, I personally started using Chromium for certain modern sites. For everything else I went back to seamonkey. Using Shell bindings I can load one of three profiles:
1. General browsing
2. Facebook (I hate it, but most of family & friends are on it)
3. Unixnut handle
4. Anonymous (this profile is deleted after exit, so each time you run it you get a fresh profile)
Each one has its own settings, its own cookie store, and its own temp dir. So the facebook profile knows nothing about me except what is in fb. It cannot access the other profiles.
This is good enough for my privacy, quite frankly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @11:14PM
Perfect time for Devuan to jump on the Pale Moon bandwagon.