firefox and GNU

[Karl Berry]

Hello Paul,

A message of yours to gnewsense-users was forwarded to the bug-gnuzilla
list.  In it, you wrote:

    But there are some real free software issues about Firefox.  The
    biggest one is that it is set up to offer downloads of non-free
    plug-ins from Mozilla's own site.

    What do we want to do about this?

Did rms neglect to mention iceweasel/gnuzilla?  He himself instigated
these projects to make a free browser based on the Mozilla sources some
time ago -- http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla.


As far as plugins go, Giuseppe (Scrivano, the person who's done all the
gnuzilla-specific coding to date) has already implemented a separate
plugin finder service.  Here is what he wrote to the bug-gnuzilla list
on Sep 30:

> We host on gnuzilla.gnu.org a modified version for the
> PluginFinderService.php file keeping there a list of free plugins.  If a
> plugin can't be found there iceweasel doesn't redirect the user to the
> site indicated in the html code as mozilla firefox does (most of the
> time the html code refers to a proprietary plugin) but shows an alert to
> the user saying there is no free plugin for that MIME type.

At this point, we have two major issues to solve before making a real
release:

1) check and remove extraneous nonfree files from the source tree (there
   are a lot, e.g., Windows executables with no sources).  I made a
   preliminary list, others chimed in with more, and at least some have
   already been removed.  Just takes grunt work to solve this.

2) Current iceweasel is based on 1.5.0.7.  Mozilla has released
   1.5.0.8.  But more than that, they have released 2.0.  Updating
   Giuseppe's new privacy features (see the web page) to 2.0, and
   generally getting things working again, is where we are now.
   Giuseppe is busy with school, so can't take the lead there.


Does any of this help?  Any gnewsense folks interested in working on
this stuff, do you think?

Thanks,
Karl