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 Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license imposes requirements for the distribution of modified versions that make it inconvenient to exercise freedom 3.

Privacy protection features

LibreJS: GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman's article The JavaScript Trap.
Https-Everywhere: Extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.
SpyBlock: Blocks privacy trackers while in normal browsing mode, and all third party requests when in private browsing mode. Based on Adblock Plus.
AboutIceCat: Adds a custom "about:icecat" homepage with links to information about the free software and privacy features in IceCat, and checkboxes to enable and disable the ones more prone to break websites.
Fingerprinting countermeasures: Fingerprinting is a series of techniques allowing to uniquely identify a browser based on specific characterisics of that particular instance (like what fonts are available in that machine). Unlike cookies the user cannot opt-out of being tracked this way, so the browser has to avoid giving away that kind of hints.

Downloads

Official releases of IceCat are available from ftp.gnu.org, or any GNU mirror. Please use a mirror if possible. Besides the sources, binary releases for GNU/Linux (32 and 64 bit) are available.

IceCat is generated from Firefox with the scripts available at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git.

Free add-ons and plugins

We maintain a list of free addons.

GNUzilla runs its own plugin finder service at gnuzilla.gnu.org.

Langpacks

You can find langpacks for IceCat in the official GNU FTP: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/ in the "langpacks" directory for a given release

These langpacks are generated automatically from the original Firefox ones, if you notice problems in your locale, please let us know at the <[email protected]> mailing list.

Online help and documentation

Community driven manuals are available at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:IceCat/

Mailing lists

General discussion of these projects take place on the mailing list [email protected] (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 [email protected].

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 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.

Getting involved

Development of IceCat, and GNU in general, is a volunteer effort, and you can contribute. For information, please read How to help GNU. If you'd like to get involved, it's a good idea to join the discussion mailing list (see above).

Maintainer: GNU IceCat is currently being maintained by Ruben Rodriguez. Please use the mailing lists for contact.

Origin of the name

The name “IceCat” was coined to show our relationship to 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.)

About GNU and the GNU Philosophy

The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software—free as in freedom, not price. Its principal sponsor is the Free Software Foundation.

The free software philosophy is the root and motivation of the guidelines and goals of the whole free software movement, a worldwide community.

Please join us!

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries to <[email protected]>. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.
Please send broken links and other corrections or suggestions to <[email protected]>.

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

We thank the Hitflip team for the IceCat logos.

Updated: $Date: 2017/07/25 14:43:11 $