Hi everyone, The fact that Iceweasel does not behave like Firefox in some important areas has been bothering me more and more of late. Iceweasel breaks many, many web apps by virtue of not using the Firefox user-agent string. It also breaks compatibility with some plugins.
I completely agree with why we have named it Iceweasel, but I disagree with breaking API compatibility with Firefox. On http://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel, we claim that it will be basically identical to Firefox. The linked announcement [1] also claims that. Here are some sites/apps that break, at least in part, because of our API claiming to be Iceweasel: Zimbra admin console BlackBoard (used by thousands of universities) http://browserplus.yahoo.com/ (claims the browser isn't supported) http://gears.google.com/ (claims browser isn't supported) hundreds of banks The conferencing app at dimdim.com Kerio mail server I know there may be technical arguments that "people shouldn't be using user agent like that." But the reality is that they are, and we have a serious usability problem because we change user agent. There's no reason that we'd have to change user agent just because we change the name it presents to us. I have a colleague that refuses to run Debian's Iceweasel. I have another that is working on groupware evaluation and is having trouble because many of the web apps don't correctly recognize Iceweasel as Firefox. It would be *great* if this could be fixed before sarge comes out. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/10/msg00665.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
