The Lurker

Iceweasel

posted by ajf on 2006-11-24 at 10:48 am

A couple of years ago, when the Mozilla project was figuring out how it would handle its Firefox trademark, a discussion between Mozilla and Debian developers produced a hypothetical alternative name, "Iceweasel". I liked the name so damn much (well, not that much, but it did make me laugh out loud) I changed my local installation of Firefox to call itself Iceweasel. That was a year or two ago now; when I got a new computer earlier this year, I didn't think it was worth the effort to reproduce the change. (In fact for a while I have been running the old Mozilla suite, because Firefox at the time was behaving erratically when opening a dozen or so tabs.)

But as of yesterday I'm running an Iceweasel once again.

Mozilla recently informed Debian's Firefox maintainers that they are not permitted to use the Firefox name if they don't use the Firefox icon. Unlike the rest of Firefox, which is free software, the icon cannot be freely distributed with accepting Mozilla's trademark licensing terms. Debian's Free Software Guidelines do not allow those restrictions to be imposed on free software Debian distributes, so the icon had been removed. As a result of Mozilla's new position, the Debian Firefox maintainers had to stop using the name Firefox. I'm quite pleased they've adopted the name Iceweasel.

Now that Iceweasel 2 is in Debian, I've had to change a bunch of preferences (using about:config) to revert two annoying user interface changes, and to disable a few older features of Firefox that I've always disliked:

browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3: Restore Firefox 1.x close button behaviour — one close button at the right hand side of the tab bar. I've used both a lot (single close button in Mozilla and Firefox, button-per-tab in Eclipse, and the single button is just better, because I find that I quite frequently want to close several tabs in quick succession).
browser.urlbar.hideGoButton = true: The Go button next to the URL bar is completely useless. It used to be a separate drag-and-drop toolbar component you could remove (or move around — I understand some people prefer it on the left side of the URL bar) by right-clicking and clicking "Customize". I can't begin to understand why they replaced that convenience with a hidden preference.
browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace = false: When I use "Open All in Tabs" in the bookmarks menu, Firefox by default closes all the tabs in the current window first. This setting restores the original Mozilla behaviour, which opens the bookmarks in new tabs, without interfering with the window's existing tabs.
browser.fixup.alternate.enabled = false: Don't automatically add ".com" to the end of what I type in the URL bar isn't a valid URL. This only ever happens when I've typed something in the wrong place by mistake, so adding .com has never helped.
keyword.enabled = false: Again, this disables a "helpful" feature of the URL bar that I didn't like. By default if what you type in the URL bar doesn't look like a URL, Firefox will perform a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search. I've disabled this because I only ever used it accidentally.