GNUzilla and IceCat

Introducing GNUzilla and IceCat

Gnuzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the source code from the Mozilla project is free software, the binaries that they release include additional non-free software. Also, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins.

In addition, GNU IceCat includes some privacy protection features:

Some sites refer to zero-size images on other hosts to keep track of cookies. When IceCat detects this mechanism it blocks cookies from the site hosting the zero-length image file. (It is possible to re-enable such a site by removing it from the blocked hosts list.)
Other sites rewrite the host name in links redirecting the user to another site, mainly to "spy" on clicks. When this behavior is detected, IceCat shows a message alerting the user.

To see these new features in action, some test pages are available. Fredrik Hubbe's web site can be used test free plugins.

Free plugin finder configuration

Gnuzilla runs its own plugin finder service at gnuzilla.gnu.org. To specify this at runtime, visit the url about:config in your browser, find the pfs.datasource.url attribute, and change the host to gnuzilla.gnu.org. Also change the protocol from https to http, if necessary. Be careful not to change the rest of the string (after the first single /).

Downloads

Official releases of IceCat are available from ftp.gnu.org, or any GNU mirror. Besides the sources, a binary release for GNU/Linux / x86 (32 bit) is available.

These releases are compressed using the lzma technique invented by Igor Pavlov. This has better compression and faster decompression than bzip2. If need be, you can download the lzma-utils distribution (all free software) to work with this format.

Test releases of IceCat are available from http://gnuzilla.gnu.org/download.

The changed files for the development sources are available through the gnuzilla project at savannah. You can check them out via anonymous CVS:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/gnuzilla co gnuzilla

The complete exploded source tree is also available.

GNUzilla keeps the triple licensing used by Firefox and Mozilla in general, in order to facilitate the reuse of code.

Mailing lists

General discussion of these projects take place on the mailing list bug-gnuzilla@gnu.org (it's not just for bug reports, despite the name). Feel free to subscribe or browse the archives.

To subscribe to the GNU IceCat mailing list, either use the mailman web interface or send empty email with a Subject: header line of just subscribe to bug-gnuzilla-request@gnu.org.

Found a bug? Have a suggestion? Please report it to the mailing list, trying to specify all the information that could be involved (platform, program version (the command GNU IceCat --version will report this), and build tools version if building from source code). Please report both the behavior you expected to the actual behavior you observed.

Help wanted

Development of GNU IceCat is a volunteer effort, and additional contributors are welcome: developers, testers, documentation writers, or any other area. Please write the mailing list. For (information about contributing to the GNU Project in general, please read How to help GNU.)

Here are some specific enhancements it would be great to have:

Create .xpi files for GNU Gnash, Plugger, and any other useful plugins.
Test the GNU Java compiler (GCJ) as a plugin. By way of background, the files contained in the sun-java source directory are C++ header files that can be used with GCJ. These headers are stub files for the Java Native Interface (JNI). The JNI interface allows Java to call (and be called by) native programs written in other languages, C++ in this case.
Rebundle IceCat's privacy features as a standard feature selectable at configure time; Firefox 3 would be a good time to do this. Think about better privacy features, too.
Implement the standard X11 -geometry option.

The primary maintainer of GNU IceCat is Giuseppe Scrivano. We thank the Hitflip team for the IceCat logos.

Origin of the name

The name “IceCat” was coined to show our relation with the Mozilla Firefox browser. Ice isn't Fire and a Cat isn't a Fox, so it is clearly a different package (we don't want Mozilla blamed for our mistakes, nor cause confusion with their trademarks), but is equally clearly intimately related (of course nearly all of the work comes from the Mozilla foundation effort, so we want to give credit).

The gNewSense BurningDog browser and the Debian IceWeasel browser are similarly derived from Firefox, also with the intent of being free software. Technically, however, these projects are maintained entirely independently of IceCat. (Previously, this GNU browser project was also named IceWeasel, but that proved confusing.)

Copyright 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice, and the copyright notice, are preserved.

Updated: $Date: 2008/03/07 19:51:57 $