Re: Packaging a free Firefox

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 11:06:32PM -0700, Chris Marusich wrote:
> Clément Lassieur <clement@lassieur.org> writes:
> 
> > I find Icecat very buggy, even if I compare it to a home-made Firefox
> > package that inherits Icecat (and thus is very close to Icecat).  For
> > example I can't even pay with my credit card with icecat-52-guix,
> > whereas I can with firefox-home-52-guix.  (It looks like a javascript
> > issue.)  Also, lots of videos don't work, and it's difficult to know
> > whether it's because of technical issues or because of DRM.
> 
> This has not been my experience with IceCat.  With two exceptions,
> IceCat has performed just as well as Firefox for me for everything I
> have done, including credit card payments.  I sometimes watch YouTube
> videos using IceCat, but I don't view many other videos, so I can't
> really comment on how well IceCat handles videos.  If it requires DRM,
> of course, it's not going to work in IceCat, which is a good thing.
> 
> When I use IceCat over TOR, it doesn't always work.  When I use IceCat
> with extensions (plugins?  add-ons?  I'm not sure what the right
> terminology is here) like NoScript enabled, it doesn't always work.  But
> when I don't use TOR and I disable those add-ons, everything works just
> as well as stock Firefox.  If you're still having trouble after
> disabling those things, can you describe the specifics of what you're
> having trouble with?
> 
> The exceptions I have experienced with IceCat:
> 
> 1) A website failed for me because IceCat enables Referer spoofing by
> default (network.http.referer.spoofSource in about:config).  I had to
> disable that feature to use that website.
> 
> 2) It used to be that IceCat would crash frequently for me.  However,
> once I changed my gfx.canvas.azure.backends and
> gfx.content.azure.backends from "cairo" to "skia", this problem stopped
> for me.  I don't know if this is still an issue , since I haven't ever
> switched it back to "cairo".  See here for details:
> 
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2016-11/msg00008.html

In my experience Icecat usually works. But sometimes it does not and
it is usually a JavaScript thing. It would be nice to have firefox
too. I agree with Clément that it is an important option for users and
it is still a dominant browser. Currently we only can install it as
binary blobs. Which are often broken in my setup.

Pj.