[Bug-gnuzilla] Icecat future development

[ng0]

Hi,

I had an exchange of ideas with other people after the recent security
announcement of firefox[2].
The state of torbrowser was brought up in Guix as a problem and a
discussion before, in the attempt to figure out how to package
torbrowser compatible to our system.

It was pointed out to me that the team which develops torbrowser is
working together with mozilla to upstream their patchset[0][1].
With this new development and the importance of networks like tor,
it would be a logic choice to switch to torbrowser as upstream of
icecat and follow their development.
At least that's one alternative I can come up with.
This will of course not be torbrowser in its original form, as
adjustments are made. Wether this differs from upstream in the default
unique fingerprint of the browser has to be monitored, but I am not
suggesting to build another torbrowser, just to use it as a more recent,
well maintained firefox codebase for icecat.
For your information, torbrowser recently switched to follow a different
version of firefox than in the last years.

I don't know about the size of your development team, it is assumed that
it is rather small? In any case, if you need help with tasks, there are
certainly some people interested in helping to make the transition to a
new version. Personally I have limited resources, so I can only be of
limited help.

I do believe that torbrowser might also benefit from this if tb is
chosen as upstream and fixes are upstreamed to either firefox or
torbrowser depending on the nature of the fix.

I am aware that this message does not cover every detail I have talked
about on other lists and off-list, but I'd like to get in contact with
you on this topic.


Additional question, what's needed to get into the store which icecat
uses? http://patrol.psyced.org/ is a extension which provides more
functionality than https-everywhere. torbrowser 6.0.3 does not use
firefox 48 as a base, but they might be working on a solution for the
forced extensions+addons signing already which will start with FF 48.


[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1260929
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1173199
[2]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-08/msg00277.html


thanks and greetings,
-- 
♥Ⓐ  ng0
For non-prism friendly talk find me on http://www.psyced.org