IceCat 52 Updates The GNU Firefox Experience

[bug77]

GNU is the operating system -- GNU is Not Unix. It's programmers programming. The legal and societal/political stuff are shuffled off under the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

I'm not entirely sure which OS is GNU (Hurd?), but you're right. I stand corrected.

[hsivonen]

Their FTP directory doesn’t show versions for all upstream security updates. Is GNU not releasing security updates when the upstream does?

[mulenmar]

I'm not entirely sure which OS is GNU (Hurd?), but you're right. I stand corrected.

Hurd isn't the OS, it's just an attempt at a Mach-based microkernel for the OS. GNU is the OS, including all the coreutils, compiler collection, emacs, etc., as I understand it. The GNU project is referred to rather interchangeably with it, in practice, best I can figure out.

[affinity-andrewm]

As browsers are one of the most important requirements for modern day computer usage, it is essential that updates are provided much more frequently than from version 45 to 52.0.2 ..... I like the idea of this, but it MUST be kept up to date, otherwise it is a waste of time.

[randomizer]

As browsers are one of the most important requirements for modern day computer usage, it is essential that updates are provided much more frequently than from version 45 to 52.0.2 ..... I like the idea of this, but it MUST be kept up to date, otherwise it is a waste of time.

45 and 52 are both extended support releases so it's entirely reasonable to have such a large jump in versions (as long as it's specifically these versions, and not intermediate versions with short support lifespans). It means that you only need to manage bug fixes and security patches, rather than entirely new releases. It's likely that the next release of IceCat will be 59, as that's the next ESR for Firefox.

[affinity-andrewm]

Okay, that's true if it gets all bug fixes and security patches; but it should have ESR in the release name too, does it?

This explains more:

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/IceCat

(should have looked there first

Do you know if it will keep the same extension/addon support when Mozilla drops it as they plan to do?

[ldo17]

Hurd isn't the OS, it's just an attempt at a Mach-based microkernel for the OS. GNU is the OS, including all the coreutils, compiler collection, emacs, etc., as I understand it.

Or is it?

[blackiwid]

Use it in all my android devices. Sadly for the desktop I use browsers like conkeror or qutebrowser cause they are keyboardfocused.

So some sort of librejs proxy software or something like that would be more useful to me.

[randomizer]

Do you know if it will keep the same extension/addon support when Mozilla drops it as they plan to do?

Can't see why they would. They rebase their work on top of Firefox proper and that would mean dropping support for old extensions unless they plan to maintain an enormous amount of legacy code, but that is not the goal of the project.