Firefox and Thunderbird

20-100

Does anybody know why NetBSD provides Firefox Nightly and Thunderbird Daily instead of releases?

nia

We don't. We supply unbranded versions because Mozilla has denied us permission to use their trademarks for our builds, after I emailed their legal department to ask permission. The default "no-brand" is "Nightly".

Hence... "Nightly Extended Support Release".

See also Debian and "IceWeasel" (Debian was eventually granted permission...)

netneo

nia Mozilla has denied us permission to use their trademarks for our builds, after I emailed their legal department to ask permission.

What's their problem this time? 🙄

20-100

Thanks for the explanation.
So this doesn't explain why it doesn't honor my customizations and doesn't load my extensions.
I'll investigate further and post the results here.

Jay

Maybe in future shift to librewolf

20-100

I've seen some work had been done on porting Chromium.
Are there technical blockers preventing the completion of this effort?
Not that I especially like chromium, but librewolf is just a custom build of Firefox, whose future looks dark.
Having the choice between Firefox derivatives and Chromium would be safer.

nia

I'm basically happy with the current Firefox situation. It doesn't matter much that we can't use their logo, and I prefer that to using software from Google.

Are there technical blockers preventing the completion of this effort?

Linux-style futexes, most likely will be present in 10.

netneo

nia I prefer that to using software from Google

Same here. I won't touch anything based on Chrome myself, and certainly not for personal use. As for Firefox, first thing I do is delete Google search! But that rarely happens since I usually synchronize my tweaked profiles to a new installation before launching Firefox. 😆

tcmart14

The non branded firefox doesn't bother me. So long as it doesn't use google's web engine, Im happy.

netneo

Librewolf seems to have sane defaults but I also generally prefer to use "stock" Firefox and tweak it to suit my needs. I always run firefox-esr myself. I don't mind that NetBSD uses an unbranded version as a workaround but as a new user it's a bit confusing when you've installed firefox-esr and find out it says "nightly" and Firefox won't show up in the menu. Glad to have found out more about why that is thanks to this thread!

netneo If you look into the package options.mk you will see the following, PKG_SUPPORTED_OPTIONS= official-mozilla-branding

So, if you build it from source, you may have the official branding

netneo

pin Interesting, thanks for pointing that out! Will have to try that sometime.