RIP Iceweasel, 13 Nov 2006 – 10 Mar 2016

This took longer than it should have, but a page is now officially turned. I uploaded Firefox and Firefox ESR to Debian unstable. They will have to go through the Debian NEW queue because they are new source packages, so won't be immediately available, but they should arrive soon enough.

People using Iceweasel from Debian unstable will be upgraded to Firefox ESR.

Debian stable will receive Firefox ESR after Iceweasel/Firefox ESR38 is end-of-lifed, in about 3 months.

Thanks go to Sylvestre Ledru, Mike Connor (the same who filed bug 354622) and Stefano Zacchiroli.

2016-03-10 13:36:28+0900

p.d.o, p.m.o

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19 Responses to “RIP Iceweasel, 13 Nov 2006 – 10 Mar 2016”

  1. Gabriel Says:
    2016-03-10 16:01:31+0900

    Firefox is introducing mandatory extensions signing. Will this version of Firefox have this feature? Won’t this prevent Debian from shipping Debian-packaged extensions?

  2. Josh Says:
    2016-03-10 16:06:32+0900

    Thanks! Great to see this.

    This should fix https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=807143 as well, right?

  3. alex Says:
    2016-03-10 16:53:43+0900

    @Gabriel:
    AFAICT this has been fixed nearly three months ago: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=800150

  4. Enrico Says:
    2016-03-10 17:05:00+0900

    Thank you for the news. In my understanding, there will be both the often-update Firefox AND Firefox ERS. They will co-exist, in Debian repos, right?

  5. Mich Says:
    2016-03-10 22:55:02+0900

    Thanks for the effort.

    Does this means the same for Thunderbird?

  6. BGP Says:
    2016-03-11 08:12:22+0900

    What about icedove?

  7. Sylvestre Says:
    2016-03-11 13:48:06+0900

    Mike is not the maintainer of icedove.

    More on this here:
    https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=816679

  8. Mauricio Navarro Miranda Says:
    2016-03-11 16:10:33+0900

    Thank you very much for this effort!

    See you on next releases, Firefox!

  9. Denis Gonzalez Says:
    2016-03-11 17:40:00+0900

    That is an amazing news. I know we could install firefox through the download and install procedure. But having it in the repos directly it’s something many people wanted years ago.

  10. Name Says:
    2016-03-13 08:43:02+0900

    This is great news! Thanks for keeping at it!

  11. Ed the Red Says:
    2016-03-13 19:43:59+0900

    I’ve been using the Ubuntuzilla repository to replace iceweasel & icedove with firefox-mozilla-build and thunderbird-mozilla-build for a couple of years since the iceweasel team made it impossible to replace the ugly, pale, washed-out ice* icons with the originals by overwriting the icon files in /usr/lib/ice*/chrome/icons/default. Never had a problem except I’d get ‘unable to update’ warnings for a day or three when the mozilla-build packages fell behind the Mozilla versions.

    Seems like firefox will be introduced to sid, will it percolate through to stable? Hopefully it will at least make its way into jessie-backports at some point.

  12. Xavier Says:
    2016-03-15 14:58:13+0900

    Any way to keep Iceweasel/Icedove ? I’m quite fond of the names and the blue/green icons, maybe with a theme or something ?

  13. Ed the Red Says:
    2016-03-15 19:49:44+0900

    Xavier, you can probably just do what I did to keep these same icons at bay. Make an alias in your .bashrc like this:

    alias foxicon=’\cp -f /myicons/default16.png /myicons/default32.png /myicons/default48.png /usr/lib/firefox/chrome/icons/default’

  14. nord-stream Says:
    2016-04-10 10:59:16+0900

    Try this out to emulate Iceweasel:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/iceweasel-branding/

    It doesn’t restore the desktop icon, though.

  15. Doonze Says:
    2016-05-31 10:09:22+0900

    After reading through the entire bug thread Mike Connor started that brought Iceweasel and Icedove into being, I now feel I’ve read a book, only to find the sequel is out of print. I’m left with so many questions

    1) What changed that now allows firefox to meet the requirements of Debian license wise?

    2) What was the thought process on changing after all this time? It’s kinda cool that Deb has has their “own” version of FF for so long.

    3) How did Mike Connor help to bring FF back into the Deb fold after being the catalyst for driving it out to begin with???

    4) Where is THAT thread, so I can lose another 2 hours of my life reading about stuff that likely only 10 people in the whole world really care about (11 now!)

    5) Is it disturbing that I find a bug report riveting reading?

  16. Richard Says:
    2016-05-31 23:06:54+0900

    @Doonze: This article answered my questions about the history of FireFox in Debian:

    https://lwn.net/Articles/676799/

  17. AC Says:
    2016-06-10 19:54:50+0900

    Firefox Tools->Page Info->Media does not work properly. On Iceweasel videos show up as videos, with the ‘Save As’ button working properly. On Firefox, this is completely broken – videos show up grayed out as ‘Media’ and the ‘Save As’ button does nothing.

    I removed Firefox, reinstalled the old Iceweasel package from the archive, and placed a hold on the package. This is how much I like Firefox.

  18. Jeff Says:
    2016-06-11 13:50:33+0900

    Just a question about the naming in the menu: will it remain “Firefox ESR” or it will become just “Firefox” in the future releases (from Stretch on)? Leaving the ESR part out may be unfair but I guess many would just not bother what version of Firefox it is, and just use it, so also the voice in the menu could be just “Firefox”. Just my two cents made question.

  19. Gary Says:
    2016-06-11 15:00:52+0900

    Firefox audio does not work on my Raspberry Pi 3. Audio was working great on Iceweasel.