[Bug-gnuzilla] IceCat 31.1.1 pre-release announcement

[Rubén Rodríguez]

After many small changes and improvements I managed to produce a new
release for IceCat, available (by now) here:
http://gnuzilla.gnu.org/releases/31.1.1/

I'd like to get some testing and feedback before doing the official
release, also to get time to update the documentation.

Some notes:

- It is based on Firefox 31 ESR. I decided to stick to the ESR upstream
releases (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/)
because they provide security updates over a stable base. This way we
won't have to fight with changes in the APIs we base our features on.
That will also eventually allow to port privacy features from
TorBrowser, which is being upgraded to follow v31 ESR too.

- To filter privacy trackers I modified Adblock Plus to allow filter
subscriptions to be optionally enabled during Private Browsing mode. I
did some other small changes, along with removing the "acceptable ads"
pseudofeature. Because of all this I decided to rebrand the extension to
"Spyblock", to avoid confusion with the upstream project.
I also set custom lists at http://gnuzilla.gnu.org/filters/ and I made a
point of preserving self-served advertisement, as the goal is not to
block ads but to preserve privacy. That's another reason for rebranding.

- I compiled binary packages for GNU/Linux using Trisquel 6, both for 32
and 64 bit. Those binaries should work in most recent distros. These are
the ones I'm more certain that should work: Trisquel 6 and 7, Ubuntu
Precise or newer, Debian Wheezy, testing and sid. Please test in other
distros and send reports of success and any bugs you find.

- Video in h264 format (youtube, vimeo...) only shows a black screen in
my machines, but so do the precompiled Firefox bundles, so I guess they
need to be compiled in a less "portable" way for that feature to work.
It seems to work when packaged for Trisquel.

- Packagers are welcome! We want to get the package in other distros and
also compiled for MacOS and Windows.

Happy testing!