Replace IceWeasel with FireFox

[detly]

If you've ever tried to use a website that requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, you'll understand why.

I've seen this claim a few times — just out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of sites that work with FF but not IW?

[lemoicavalier]

If you've ever tried to use a website that requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, you'll understand why.

I've seen this claim a few times — just out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of sites that work with FF but not IW?

Rhapsody if you want to use the "play now" option. I'm sure there are other cases, the Internet is a huge place

[Lavene]

If you've ever tried to use a website that requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, you'll understand why.

I've seen this claim a few times — just out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of sites that work with FF but not IW?

I had problems with Yahoo mail. The 'compose' form was too small in Iceweasel (some 40 characters wide). However, spoofing the FF useragent fixed it. This was a couple of months ago though and I didn't really look into it since I normally don't use Yahoo mail anyway...

Tina

[Pjotr]

Of course, if you're smart, you'd just use konqueror...

[BioTube]

Konqueror's user agent is a little subpar. There's no option for recent Firefox/IE versions and no place to put a custom string in.

[lemoicavalier]

Konqueror's user agent is a little subpar. There's no option for recent Firefox/IE versions and no place to put a custom string in.

Not to mention that some sites actually do need at least Firefox for real technical reasons (A few examples were given here already)... And all because of crappy web developers, must of which don't even know what the W3C is.

[Eck]

If you got the user agent switcher for Iceweasel you could get into just about any site, including those looking for Internet Explorer (unless you needed Active X).

A bit of searching will find that for you, as well as a newer list a few sites have available.

I used Firefox 1.0.5 (Slackware Linux) to get Rhapsody working. Yes, this is on Debian, but the Debian setting didn't work. Most just work with default Iceweasel and the majority of the rest work with the Firefox 2.0 (Windows XP) switch. Crazy, but Rhapsody need that old versioned Slackware one. There's lots of different choices and you get a menu in the Tools drop down to switch between them. But it's really rarely needed. My banks work without using it.

[GnuHDL]

Thank you my friends!
your answers Practically and Philosophically were great!

[L_V]

So Debian has clearly made considerable changes to the Firefox code. .

Where is it possible to find a list of these "considerable" changes from Firefox to Iceweasel ?
It should help for better clarity. Still obscure to me.

[canci]

The only thing that violated the DFSG is the logo. Everything else was acceptable. Therefore, the logo was replaced with the generic one.

Well, yes, but Iceweasel is also different in that it is maintained by the
Debian team, so in terms of security, it is more tailored to the Debian
system... I think Isn't it?

Well anyway, I'd always trust Debian packages more than ones I compile
myself, or I get from wild repos (If I have the choice). And the Firefox issue
is really fixed in a jiffy... There was a thread about this, so it won't be hard to
find. With the user agent you can also make the site believe you had
Windows instead of Linux. Dunno if this would be any useful, but maybe it
comes in handy when downloading crappy proprietary whatever from the MS site...

Evil, ha?

[Velvet Elvis]

So Debian has clearly made considerable changes to the Firefox code. .

Where is it possible to find a list of these "considerable" changes from Firefox to Iceweasel ?
It should help for better clarity. Still obscure to me.

apt-get source iceweasel

the diffs should be in there.

Firefox is very windows centric. Debian (and any other linux distro worth its salt) has to do a fair bit of hacking to turn it into a well behaved unix application. The geko and javacript libraries are split out into their own packages so that all geko based browsers in debian use them without there having to be two copies of the same codebase in use at the same time.

go to about:buildconfig to see the compile time options.

[L_V]

apt-get source iceweasel
the diffs should be in there.

I forgot to say I am not a developer.
The problem is when you have different behaviors between Firefox and Iceweasel, you get lost because you don't have any Iceweasel support to understand what happens (can happen with JavaScript).

A difference summary (not a code diff) should at least be welcome to better understand.
I've tried Iceweasel, but back to Firefox because noticed some differences (ie font management), and bored playing with tricky mozilla profiles for font settings, or QT/Gtk problems.

And Thunderbird: I am using V2 for more than one year ! (since alpha).
Icedove is still V1.5.
Dangerous to mix V1.5 and V2 profiles (at least it has been dangerous....)
Then using Thunderbird I get from mozilla ftp.

[Velvet Elvis]

to get the default mozzilla.org font handling put the following in /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc:

MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

[L_V]

If you read this , needless to say this iceweaselrc file also needs some clarification.

I've found this in mine:

Code: Select all

# which /dev/dsp wrapper to use
ICEWEASEL_DSP="none"

Without any explanation, don't know what this new file is managing.
The added value of Iceweasel vs Firefox should be better communicated, as well as configuration file differences.

More generally speaking, I support this one:

I still think the font management in debian (and linux in general) is a nightmare, with all the different tools (which one should we use? fontconfig? defoma? other one?) and confusion between app fonts and Xorg fonts.

[plugwash]

debian builds with the pango font rendering back end enabled, i'm not sure exactly why but I think it has to do with better internationalisation than the one mozilla uses in the official builds.

Other than that I think most of the changes in iceweasel are bugfixes, rebranding and fixes for architectures that mozilla doesn't support.