[ale] Alternative builds of Firefox besides Iceweasel?

Ted W. ted-lists at xy0.org
Tue Aug 25 10:38:17 EDT 2015


On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 06:54:27PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Aug 2015 15:36:39 -0400
> "Ted W." <ted-lists at xy0.org> wrote:
> 
> > I have become increasingly annoyed with Mozilla's stance on what
> > browsers should and should not do for their users. I understand their
> > points but I don't want MY browser forcing my plugins to be signed (I
> > have several plugins I prefer to build from source). I don't want MY
> > browser rejected bad SSL if it's SHA-1 and I don't want MY browser
> > preventing me from running things like Java when it's not up to date.
> > I miss the days when my browser did what I told it to do and didn't
> > try to protect me from the bad out there </s>. Sometimes I just want
> > my browser to expect me to know that I've got things configured a
> > certain way and that I want them to work like that rather than
> > assuming certain things are misconfigurations. An example of this is
> > a KVM switch we have at the office that requires a terribly old
> > version of Java to use the web console and uses an old SHA-1
> > certificate. I have a Firefox installation specifically configured to
> > use this page which has the self signed certificate trusted and the
> > right version of Java. But I can't use it anymore because the
> > certificate is SHA-1 and Firefox won't run the insecure version of
> > Java.
> > 
> > There have got to be some alternative builds of Firefox out there
> > created by people in similar situations. If not, then are there other
> > browser options out there which will "just work" (tm) like the Firefox
> > of old?
> > 
> 
> I'm curious: What distro are you using?
> 
> SteveT
> 
I am using Debian 8 at home and RHEL6 at work.

I'm trying out Icecat now after Jim's suggestion. It looks more like the
Firefox I'm used to. It looks like they've frozen it back at 31.8, a bit
before the latest ESR release. I'm curious if they've frozen it and just
backport security fixes or if they're just behind the 8-ball, so to
speak because of resource constraints.

Overall I'm pretty happy with Icecat, though the libreJS thing can kind
of be a pain. I may see about swapping that out (even though I run with
No-Script on for 99% of the sites I go to, that 1% seems to be using
"non-free" JS).
-- 
Ted Wood <ted-lists at xy0.org>
Registered GNU/Linux user #413569


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