I guess I'm a downstream, Hi Icecat, Browser Extensions, makeicecat

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Hi Icecat people, I'm idk, I work on the I2P project mostly but some of
the things I work on might find a good home in Icecat. There's a bit of
backstory, last year, we decided to attempt a Tor Browser fork. It
turned out to not be particularly sustainable for us as a sort of
monolithic project, so the project was placed on hiatus. On my weekends,
I looked for solutions that would work in ways that would work in the
longer term. During that time I discovered that many of the things I
needed were also things I found in or around IceCat, like, for instance,
a process for Mozilla trademark removal. So when I started experimenting
with creating a new I2P Browser in practice, I adapted the makeicecat
script and building my I2P-specific tooling around it.

My project is approaching a pretty interesting and borderline-usable
phase with many parts that can exist independently of the whole that
could be interesting to your upstream, particularly in the form of two
WebExtensions, "I2P in Private Browsing" and "Onion in Container Tabs"
which leverage the Container Tabs feature of Firefox to build a workflow
for Tor and I2P-based enhanced private browsing. They both work a little
differently from the existing Tor-enabling "Onion Browser Button" tab in
that proxied and un-proxied content co-exist in the same browser, but in
different container tabs, and they are designed to be used
"automatically" when visiting .onion and .i2p domains, routing those
domains to the appropriate container tab(But never the reverse). So
instead of applying proxy settings browser-wide,  you click a button
that says "Start Onion Browsing Tab" and a clearly-labeled purple tab
appears in the browser where Onion Browsing happens. I believe this to
be an improvement on the available functionality, however one drawback
is that there is no UI for webextensions to use container tabs in
Firefox for Android yet.

I2P extension
https://github.com/eyedeekay/I2P-in-Private-Browsing-Mode-Firefox/

Onion extension
https://github.com/eyedeekay/Onion-in-Container-Browsing-Mode-Firefox as
you can see, I wanted to make it very clear I was in contact with all my
upstreams before I made a binary release widely available, but all the
code is available here.

Besides that, I wonder if it would be interesting to you, or viable in
the long-term, if I were to re-write makeicecat so that it could take
arguments that would turn it from a script which re-brands Firefox to
IceCat, into a script which re-brands Firefox to $USER_SUPPLIED_NAME,
$USER_SUPPLIED_ORG, $USER_SUPPLIED_WIKI,
$USER_SUPPLIED_DIR_OF_RESOURCES, etc, with IceCat values for the
default. That way, other projects with similar needs to IceCat could use
it as a starting point, like I have. My thinking is that it would enable
others to create Firefox-based browsing products in much the same way
that purpose-specific Chromium forks have been created like Electron for
providing application UI. Such a project would need a de-branded Firefox
under their own administration to create their Firefox-based Electron
alternative, and IceCat seems to me like the most convenient and
responsible place to start. However, I see that makeicecat sees some
significant rewrites across Firefox ESR's and would like your advice on
such an approach.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks very much for your time.

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