Package IceWeasel not in ubuntu repositories

[pranith]

Most of you might be aware of the copyright issues which Mozilla had with Debian. This made the debian team to repackage Firefox removing all the copyrighted material in Firefox as IceWeasel.

I believe the Ubuntu philosophy and the Debian "Social Contract" are mostly similar. Hence all the issues Debian had with Firefox must be the same with Ubuntu.

Hence, I think the package Iceweasel must atleast be present in the ubuntu repositories so that people who want to use it as a matter of principle can do so. It should not be much work since Debian is maintaining that package anyway. We can just use their package as we do for most of the other packages.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

We will not be adding iceweasle to the Ubuntu repos at this time as we have firefox and enough other browsers.

[A. Bram Neijt (bneijt)]

With the problems with the EULA currently in discussion, I think IceWeasel should be considered for packaging again. Surely "enough other browsers" is not a reason to stop another browser from being included? Freedom is based on choice, is it not?

[Chip Bennett (chipbennett)]

In light of recent developments, please re-open this bug report for consideration.

[Roman Polach (rpolach)]

It seems to me that Mozilla's position to firefox name and logo trademark policy wouldn't change in near future,
although problems with distributions were widely discused starting some time ago.
In this case, this state should be accepted and several steps should be done:
* firefox should be moved to restricted,
* iceweasel should be add and placed in main,
* iceweasel should be installed by default because
   a) we need free-as-much-as possible default desktop installation (like with video drivers etc.)
   b) fuctionality equivalent to firefox, so users wouldn't be disapointed (in contrast to have e.g. epiphany installed)

[Rthaduthd Anthnhkrc (nthnuekeu-deactivatedaccount)]

If you do this then make sure the "user-agent" HTTP header still sends "firefox" and not "iceweasel" or something as this will break a _ton_ of sites.

[chris_c (c-camacho)]

if you are going to play fast and loose with the user agent - btw web "designers" its very bad practice to look for them!

make it

Iceweasel is NOT Firefox/3.0

so it identifies it as Iceweasel but the idiots looking for the word Firefox or Iexploder in the user agent will at least find something...

[Hew (hew)]

Iceweasel / Icedove / Iceowl / Iceape should be included in the Ubuntu repositories as an option for users that want them. Perhaps this could be handled with an iceweasel-3.0-branding package like the current firefox / abrowser situation.

This bug is dependent on bug 269656, but regardless of the outcome, the ice* packages should be made available in the repositories.

[pranith (bobby-prani)]

One thing i don't understand is the need to create a new abrowser, when Iceweasel could have easily been used here.

Anyone mind explaining this to me??

[Roman Polach (rpolach)]

and there is more confusion:
There were 2 branches of iceweasel: debian and gnu one.
Gnu iceweasel is know as icecat now - http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

So it seems that we have 3 firefox imitations - icecat, iceweasel and abrowser.
I also wish somebody explained me the differences.

[Hew (hew)]

This bug is a request for Debian Iceweasel (and Icedove, Iceowl and Iceape). The request for GNU Icecat is at bug 178075.

Abrowser ("Web Browser") is a new branding package introduced for Ubuntu Intrepid. I also think that Iceweasel would be a better option here, but we need to know the outcome of bug 269656 before dealing with these rebranding issues.

If you are confused, you may find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranding useful.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

We added Abrowser instead of using iceweasel since we dont get our firefox packages from Debian but we use upstream sources.

[chris_c (c-camacho)]

Doesn't that loose all the Debian patches doing it that way? - seems the hard way for no reason