Navegadores.org

Giuseppe Scrivano, GNU developer has been very kind and answered some questions about IceWeasel for Navegadores.org

1. Hello Giuseppe. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your development works please.

Hello there. I am a 21 years old student in computer engineering. As you can imagine I have fun with computers. The ideal environment to do it is a system based completely on Free Software where you don’t only use inertly your programs and adapt yourself to them but you can adapt programs to you and your needs.

This is not my first experience in the Free Software world, I helped a bit here and there on different projects in GNU and not, probably the project where I spent more time is MyServer, http://www.myserverproject.net, a fast and lightweight web server.

2. What are the main problems and differences of the Mozilla Firefox browser and Debian license?

The Mozilla’s software itself is free software, it means you can run it, study how it works, redistribute copies (even for a fee), modify it, according to the four free software freedoms. The problem with distributing it is that Mozilla has trademark rights on its logo and its products so it is not possible to distribute a different “Mozilla Firefox” but only the original binaries you
can find on their site. For further information about their policy you can take a look here: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html.

3. How many people would work in this project? Tell us a bit about the new ‘Iceweasel’ development team.

At the moment there are only two active developers in this project, me and Karl Berry, many times RMS (NT. Richard M. Stallman) helped us with comments and suggestions, giving us general guidelines to follow. I hope Debian folks will help us to achieve the common goal to free completely the best browser out there.

4. Will the users be able to install original Firefox in their debian/ubuntu OS?

Users can download original Firefox binaries from the http://www.mozilla.org site and install it using its installer. In this way the browser is not managed by the APT system present on Debian and Ubuntu.

I suggest to use the packages manager present on your system when possible to don’t update applications by yourself and avoid inconsistencies with files.

5. The ‘IceWeasel’ name, it isnt nonsense at all, right? I suppose it has a meaning, hasnt it?

Yes, it has a deep meaning, Ice is not Fire and Weasel is not Fox

6. Are you going to add new features in Iceweasel concerning to Firefox?

At the moment we haven’t other features in mind to add to IceWeasel but we are open to suggestions. We are interested mainly to protect users privacy, we already include two new features that help to do it, a zero-size images protection and host rewriting alert.

The former is a protection against web sites including a zero-sized image usually hosted on another site; in this way you can track user habits, from the cookie is possible to detect the user identity and with the referer information sent by the browser look at the site the user was browsing. You can imagine how is easy to have a detailed report about visited sites.

The host rewriting alert gives user a message when the web page tries to modify a link present in the page is modified to point to another site when you click on it, I don’t think it is good to give more details about this mechanism but it is very easy to track users. IceWeasel gives only an alert because we don’t know in advance what web applications we could break if we decided differently.

7. Do you have any ‘release date’ on the air?

We have a pre-release version available on our site. There are both binary files for GNU/Linux-i386 and the source tarball. An official release will be as soon as we check in detail what files we can ship and what we can’t. We don’t know when it will be precisely but we hope as soon as possible. Any help is appreciated during this phase, feel free to join our mailing list to have an idea of what should be done.

8. About the new icon, do you have any ideas?

I haven’t any idea yet about the new icon to use for IceWeasel. For whom is interested there is a page on the Ubuntu wiki with new icons, add your image or simply comment what is there: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IceWeaselIcon

9. Dont you think the new development could be a break into the Firefox community?

We don’t suppose to break anything in the Firefox community. We are not going to keep a separate fork for Firefox but only distribute a completely Free version of it. In addition, IceWeasel will keep the triple licensing used by Mozilla’s Firefox to facilitate the reuse of code, we will be glad if our modifications will be included in the original source tree.

10. What are you expectations with IceWeasel?

I hope people will understand how is important to use Free Software. There is no reason to use proprietary plugins where there are Free counterparts.

11. Thanks a lot for this interview, do you want to add something else?

No, That’s all. Thanks for your time.

alex IceWeasel