Mozilla officially gave us permission to use the Firefox name on Haiku!

Software Ports
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve got some fantastic news that finally resolves the question raised in this older thread about using the Firefox name.

As many of you know, we’ve been working on bringing a modern Mozilla browser to Haiku for a while. The initial patches and the heavy lifting were done by @KENZ, who deserves a massive thank you. I just picked up the baton to update the port to modern versions (currently 153.0) and keep it running smoothly on current Haiku.

Because of Mozilla’s strict trademark rules, we’ve always distributed the package under the name Iceweasel to stay on the safe side. But I really wanted us to be able to use the official name, so I decided to just ask them. I emailed the Mozilla Trademark Team and explained exactly how we build the browser.

I made it clear to them that:

  • We build strictly from the original upstream source code
  • Our patches only deal with Haiku platform compatibility (POSIX, IPC, audio API) and don’t change how the browser works at all
  • We don’t touch the default search engines or partner codes
  • Telemetry is currently disabled simply because the Glean doesn’t compile on Haiku yet. It’s a technical limitation, not a policy choice

Today, I got a reply from Mike Kaply at Mozilla. What’s really huge is that he CC’d Joshua Landau, the Chief Legal Officer of Mozilla, which makes this 100% official at the highest level. Mike wrote:

Consider this email permission to distribute as Firefox.

He also encouraged us to try upstreaming our patches to Bugzilla and expressed hope that we can get the telemetry figured out in the future.

So, what does this mean for HaikuPorts?

We will soon have an official Firefox package with the real branding!
But don’t worry, Iceweasel isn’t going anywhere. I plan to maintain both. The idea is to keep Iceweasel as the privacy-friendly, telemetry-free build, while Firefox will be the fully official, Mozilla-compliant build (with telemetry enabled, once I manage to fix the Glean rust issues).

Huge thanks to everyone who has tested the builds, reported bugs, and supported this journey. Haiku is getting its official modern browser!

73 Likes
2

The heavy lifting is mainly done by X512 and Waddlesplash! I managed to make their build system start working and struggled some weird bugs. Big thank you for keeping port up-to-date!! (And spreading patches to many Gecko based softwares!)

20 Likes
3

Great work everyone!

1 Like
4

Great news for the Haiku visibility!

One note though : according to LinkedIn the Chief Legal Officer is Carlos Torres.

Any screenshot of this exchange would be great as well if it’s an answer from Mozilla :slight_smile:

5
6

I will forward the reply letter to anyone who needs it, if asked. But it’s probably not worth posting a screenshot here.

7

screenshot147
screenshot1471920×1080 336 KB

37 Likes
8

That’s really good news, with the big thank you to KENZ for making the browser port possible in the first place, and yourself for maintaining it.

Having the Firefox port, along with X512’s Nebula driver and the recent enabling of the NVMM hypervisor has at least for myself made Haiku a much more capable OS for daily driving. Seems like Haiku is going to have more great times ahead.

5 Likes
9

Is this available to download yet? From HaikuDepot or anywhere else? If not, is there an ETA for availability?..Thanks!

10

In the next day or two, I’ll prepare and publish Firefox to haikuports, and it will be available for installation via HaikuDepot.

I’ve currently received recommendations for upstreaming our changes and am starting to prepare patches related to external dependencies - first, I’ll try to push MediaKit support patches into the cubeb library.

19 Likes
11

Firefox’s telemetry feature is fully functional and now meets all Mozilla requirements (you can turn it off in settings if you don’t want this information sent)

screenshot149
screenshot1491920×1080 241 KB

23 Likes
12

Oh, cool…awesome…thanks!

13

Me myself use Floorp on Haiku, but I know Firefox code as Nightly and Iceweasel made possible that Floorp made its way to Haiku by all of porters.

Congratulations and thank you for these browsers till Webpositive is under ongoing development - maturing to more configurable and usable - and beyond as well !..

14

Unfortunately, Floorp has switched to a different build system, and I haven’t yet managed to build the current version.

15

Well, I do not use advanced stuff from Floorp, so no problem not upgraded. On Linux Mint also use for following Haiku services, and Japanese stuff videos.
The problem is rather basic things in configuring does not work as those stuff is in read-only diskspace, like language installation, and setup to syntax checks my native language, and so on … and of course that issue in all browsers on Haiku : the tabs cannot be moved to re-order, or drag & drop does not work - probably as well as some message behaviour difference with other OS that would resolve data transfer between apps.
I do not mind, if it does not upgraded so frequent - unfortunately on Linux Mint at least weekly I get newer versions, and sometimes more frequent.

16

Issues with tab functionality (specifically dragging) are not caused by the browser itself; they require improvements to the Wayland server - specifically, the addition of full drag-and-drop support.

17

I see, I thought it relates to difference how in Bmessage communication works on Haiku and similar IPC stuff on other OSes.
I’m just a curious end user, not a developer, so I just guessing these things generally.

18

This is truly awesome and a proof Haiku is almost a daily driver OS !

1 Like