[Liverpool] Iceweasel

[Simon Johnson]

>
> Hi all,
>
> Iceweasel was mentioned at the last meeting and there seems to be a
> continuing meme that the browser is somehow behind Firefox and was
> branched off from on an old version (I shall mention no names as to
> where this meme resides ;-)


One of the things that really lets desktop Linux down is the browser
experience. It was so bad that I ditched my Debian install and went to
Windows 7.

The browser is probably the single most important application in a modern
operating environment*. Yet Debian has just about the worst browser of any
modern OE.

The Windows version of Firefox is much more stable and requires fewer
megabytes of memory than the Linux version. Ice Weasel is simply
terrible. It is incredibly buggy and because its internal name is different
to that of Firefox, some extensions don't work with it.

It goes back to the point I was making in a previous e-mail about how we
can't give libre software a free pass simply because it is free.

If you compare Opera to Firefox, Opera is technically superior in almost
every dimension. The only area where it is weak is in the plug-in space.

It uses less memory, it's faster, and has many features that are included as
standard that would require extensions in Firefox.

If we want free software to succeed, we have to take quality and feature
depth seriously. Firefox simply can't afford not to address its instability
on Linux and it's crappy memory management.

It's sad, because I enjoyed every *other* part of the Linux. But Linux
without a half decent browser is practically useless.

Cheers,

Simon

* I use Operating Environment over Operating System to avoid confusion
between the operating system (which is the kernel) and distribution (which
contains everything else). Using this convention neatly disarms the idiots
who want to call Linux, GNU/Linux.
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