Wednesday, October 11, 2006

IceWeasel - A pure GNU version of Firefox


IceWeasel is a free software derivation of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Along with Gnuzilla it is the GNU attempt to create a version of Firefox which can be used by free software GNU/Linux and UNIX software distributions. It removes the unfree artwork and plugins that free software advocates considered to be problematic. IceWeasel is a fork of Firefox, but will continue to synchronize with upstream releases in the future.
Recently Boing boing ran a story on this:
It said :"IceWeasel is a version of Firefox created for use in "free" operating systems like Debian (and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu), which eschew any element that can't be freely reused by anyone, for any reason. Iceweasel was developed because Firefox and the Firefox logo are trademarked, and because some of the default Firefox plugins can't be freely redistributed. Iceweasel will be synchronized with the current Firefox release, but without the non-free artwork and plugins."

A mailing list entry on this can be found here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/02/msg00279.html

Wkipedia entry
official link

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