Re: Packaging a free Firefox

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

2018-05-02T23:06:37+0200 Clément Lassieur wrote:
> Hi,

Hi Clément,

> I find Icecat very buggy, even if I compare it to a home-made Firefox
> package that inherits Icecat (and thus is very close to Icecat).  For
> example I can't even pay with my credit card with icecat-52-guix,
> whereas I can with firefox-home-52-guix.  (It looks like a javascript
> issue.)  Also, lots of videos don't work, and it's difficult to know
> whether it's because of technical issues or because of DRM.

I have noticed somepeople advocating for packaging Firefox in GNU Guix,
and since FF still has freedom issues, I see it as a no-go. What if,
instead of making Guix's own "IceCat based on latest Firefox", we do get
in touch with IceCat project instead so that they get convinced to use
"latest Firefox" (and perhaps help them?) instead of ESR? Another option
is to package Trisquel's Abrowser.

As for the JavaScript issue, it really is a matter of reaching out to
the *website owners*, or changing the service provider. Really, serious
business people that value end-user privacy, security and accessibility
shouldn't be requiring the clients to run client-side forced
autoexecutable code, specially now that we found out about Meltdown and
Spectre unfixable vulnerabilities.

>   5. it prevents the installation of non-free plugins,

Could you please report this bug to GNUzilla project (the one
responsible for IceCat)? If by "prevents" you mean "forbids" then this
is definetively a bug, not a feature. Free/libre software shouldn't
forbid doing that, it insltead mustn't *recommend* doing it, and must
not mention these non-free functional data.

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