On Monday 14 September 2020 18:22:35 E. Liddell wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Sep 2020 08:01:40 -0700
>
> William Morder via tde-users <ml-migration-agent@...> wrote:
> > On a side note, I wonder if we could get a proper, working, up-to-date
> > version of icecat into the repositories somewhere (as it has disappeared
> > from Trisquel and others).
>
> Why?  It's just a rebrand of Firefox with a few trivial patches, as far as
> I know. If you find Firefox itself unsatisfactory, try one of the other
> forks/cousins from the Mozilla family (Pale Moon, Waterfox, or Seamonkey).
>
Not so! True, it does look pretty much the same, and to the untrained eye, 
they are about equal. After having used a lot of Mozilla browsers, I can tell 
you for sure that Icecat offers some major differences. 

For one thing, if you use Tork to manage the Tor network, you can watch the 
system requests that go out of your browser. If you have a graphical firewall 
that shows live connections in real time, you can watch what requests are 
sent out over direct connections. Lots of these requests go out in Firefox 
and other browsers, no matter how we might try to stop them. Whenever I would 
simply click on an open tab for a web page (weather, TV channels, 
ycombinator, whatever), immediately system calls went out, not only to the 
web page itself, but to other third-parties, despite the fact that I have 
systematically disabled everything of that sort, blocked sites, use a 
modified hosts file, etc. 

Only Icecat blocks tracking of this sort. You don't have to believe me, of 
course; just check it out for yourself. On the other hand, even Icecat could 
be improved in small ways; but I would say that it comes closest to actual 
respect for users, and enabling a user to make the browser behave as desired. 

Otherwise, you ought to just collect all your personal information, make it 
neat and orderly, put copies in envelopes, and mail them to Amazon, Google, 
Facebook, and all the rest; because you are just giving it all away, every 
time you open a browser, every single page you load, every tab you click, 
every scroll through the page, every little detail that gives away who you 
are. 

> >I suppose a browser is not really a candidate for
> > becoming a TDE-Trinity package? but it is a thought, since we already
> > have Konqueror, which is a web browser as well as a file manager.
>
> There's a couple of obvious problems:
>
> 1. Firefox and all its forks are GTK-based.  TDE is (T)QT-based.
>
> 2. Adopting another Really Huge codebase is the last thing this project
> needs right now.  If the manpower to work on a browser were available, it
> would be better to put it to use replacing Konqueror's layout and scripting
> engines with something more modern.

Yeah, I sort of expected this answer. I didn't know the technical details, but 
I knew that people who work on mozilla-type browsers usually work on the same 
kinds of things; probably for good reason. 

Still, it would be nice to see Icecat in the respositories. 

>
> E. Liddell
>

I will count you as in the *not interested* category. 

;-)

Bill