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What is Iceweasel?

Iceweasel is a fork [from Firefox] with the following purpose :

  1. backporting of security fixes to declared Debian stable version.

  2. no inclusion of trademarked Mozilla artwork (because of #1 above)

Beyond that, they will be basically identical. (quoting Roberto C. Sanchez post in debian-devel mailing list)

How to install Iceweasel (Firefox)

Iceweasel can be installed from the Debian repository with

and native language versions such as iceweasel-l10n-fr are also available.

Nevertheless a newer backport from the Debian Mozilla team is usually preferable. The Wikipedia explains some of the terminology.

Plugin

The plugin directory is

while Debian-based xul-ext plugins can be found at

for more info on Iceweasel plugins, refer to the plugins section of the Mozilla page.

User-Agent string

Iceweasel's User-Agent strings are currently:

Some websites will serve different content depending on this string, or prevent access. You can change the User-Agent string manually (about:config, general.useragent.override preference) or via the User Agent Switcher plugin.

By default, general.useragent.compatMode.firefox is set to true, which includes "Firefox" in the User-Agent string.

Debian-Mozilla site

This is a resource where you can get the latest Iceweasel release which would eventually make it way into Debian's experimental, unstable and finally to testing and then stable. Usually the releases make their way to Debian unstable and then go downwards while the beta versions are released to experimental. Most of the aurora releases can be found at the mozilla.debian.net repo.

You can also connect with the Debian-mozilla maintainers via the mailing list as well as on IRC via #debian-mozilla on irc.oftc.net.

SSL / Secure Connection warning

The message

Can be disabled. see : http://changetheworldwithyourpassion.blogspot.com/2008/07/turn-off-secure-connection-failed-in.html

Customizing the default profile

The files that are copied to ~/.mozilla/firefox/ when creating a new Iceweasel profile (when the browser is run the first time, or by using the -P command-line option) may be found in /etc/iceweasel/profile/. These files will populate the new profile with default settings, extensions and much more.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox

Troubleshooting

  1. Iceweasel is consistently crashing on a website
  2. First run Iceweasel without loading any extensions or plugins and see if the problem persists. This can be done by using the -safe-mode option

    MOZILLA_DISABLE_PLUGINS=1 iceweasel -safe-mode

    mv ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/old_firefox
    iceweasel &

Unsupported Browser Error

See also