Re: Packaging a free Firefox

[Chris Marusich]

Clément Lassieur <address@hidden> 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

-- 
Chris

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