Hi. On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 08:40:51AM -0400, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote: > > That would mean (in the context of Debian) that one would have to > > (a) use the Basilisk-bundled libs (generally a no-no in Debian) > > or (b) use a different name & brand. Yes, we know this story with > > Firefox/Iceweasel. That'd mean that the packaging effort would > > be a bit... more interesting. > > The main distinction, however, was that in the Debian case, Mozilla > objected to the backporting of security-sepcific fixes and then > continuing to call the patched version "Firefox." As I recall, all that > was before they started offering ESR builds, so every version of Firefox > was a quickly moving target with at most a few months of support.
It still is, for me at least. I miss old days where they gave me one Iceweasel version for the duration of stable release. > Once the Firefox project started offering builds that made sense within > Debian's stable release process, the Iceweasel branding could be dropped > and builds could be included in Debian which both satisfied the needs of > patching security vulnerabilities and the upstream branding > requirements. If only Debian project did something about Firefox privacy settings. Let's face it - Mozilla are hypocrites. They loudly 'care about users' privacy', but then force their 'opt-out telemetry' on you. Debian's Firefox build disables some of the offending settings by default, but not all of them. At least at Google they are honest enough to say - 'we will spy on you and we do not give a f*** about your option'. > A project that says "you can't even change the build flags" strikes me > as not especially inclined to display the flexibility that Mozilla > eventually did. Moreover, a project is x86-only. How exactly such upstream will react to patches that, for example, fix segfault/sigill on armhf? > In fact, since they are so concerned about "disastrous" > library combinations and insist on their bundled/patched versions being > used, I find it surprising that they do not specifically dictate which > compilers are authorized to create branded builds. Careful, they might be reading this ;) > > > Does Debian project really needs yet another Iceweasel incident? > > > > What the world needs (badly) is more browser alternatives. I'm > > seeing everything converging towards the dystopia where one huge > > corporation controls the server and the client. We had that, and > > it wasn't pretty; nowadays with smartphones, always-on, IoT and > > perhaps worse, we are far more vulnerable to that (business?) model. > > > I agree. I have already begun encountering sites which behave badly in > Firefox, requiring me to switch to Chromium (and in case Chrome itself, > uggh). I definitely do not want to return to the bad old days where > most websites had something like "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.5+" > on every page :-( It's happened already. The catch there is that you need Chrome to display that 'best viewed in' badge. Reco
