Usage of Firefox name for Haiku port

Continuing the discussion from Progress on porting Firefox:

It’d be good to reach out to Mozilla and ask what they expect from us so that we can use the Firefox name for our port:

  • Do all the Haiku-specific patches need to be upstreamed?
  • How often our port has to be updated and synced with the upstream? (ESR and regular versions).
  • Is there anything else?

According to the Mozilla distribution policy:

If you wish to distribute a modified version of Firefox or other Mozilla software with Mozilla trademarks please contact us with your request at trademark-permissions@mozilla.com

@jt15s does it look like something the marketing team can handle? If not, who else can handle that conversation?

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I think getting Mozilla’s blessing to use Firefox will be a great thing for the project.

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I doubt mozilla will be acomodating, considering they now shifted focus to advertising…

Debian has had trouble for years with them, and there even is a native linux version of firefox.

Isn’t it because they apply their own patches? As long as Haiku changes are upstreamed I’m sure it will be fine.

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Either we patch it to remove their nonsense and spyware, or you can pick the firefox name… To me the choise seems somewhat clear.

I highly doubt a no-patches everything upstream firefox port will ever be a thing.

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Remember that you can also apply the Firefox patches on top of a Librewolf source archive and will most likely get a working browser.
Unfortunately I couldn’t try,on my hardware not even building normal Firefox works.
I highly doubt the Librewolf team would have an issue with using their branding if we choose to go that route.

LibreWolf doesn’t really fit everybody’s needs for a standard firefox-based browser since it’s very much geared towards security and privacy.

What’s bad about having privacy and security by default?
You can always turn off individual protections if they don’t work for you.

I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m also glad with your attempts at porting LibreWolf, but LibreWolf has a niche purpose and is hyperfocused on that (wiping cookies, preventing fingerprinting, etcetera). It’s just not for everyone and definetely not what you would expect for a default firefox browser. Those things can be disabled, but wouldn’t that be a unnecesairy hassle. LibreWolf can’t replace firefox is what I’m trying to convey.

It totally can replace it.
The cookie wiping on close is the only annoying thing that I instantly disable at every new Librewolf install.
Everything else can’t hurt your browsing experience,even if you don’t think you really need it.
Why would you want to be fingerprinted,ever?
Why would you want anyone to know you’re using Haiku,and you’re probably the only user with Haiku on that site,instead of sending Firefox on Windows 10?
Why would you want to send telemetry to Mozilla when it can be turned off?
Why would you want a default search engine that tracks everything you do,everywhere,when you can have sane defaults instead (not saying that DuckDuckGo is good,but at least it’s not Google)
Why would you want to see ads or load trackers,ever?
It’s a shame that in 2024 the plain Firefox still doesn’t have a preinstalled Adblocker while even most of the Chromium-based browsers have one.
I honestly don’t see a need for a privacy-invasive standard configuration of Firefox when there’s a chance to get something better at zero cost and with exactly the same rendering engine,the same web standards compliance and such.

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No, it’s not. The dispute was mainly because Debian used non-official branding (logo) for their Firefox port, and also because of a disagreement with Mozilla regarding backporting of the security fixes to DebianStable. They settled it back in 2016, and from that time Debian uses Firefox browser with its official name.

From what I’ve seen with other ports (*BSD/Solaris) it’s fine to keep some patches not upstreamed. It’s just needs to be agreed with Mozilla.

One can turn off Firefox analytics and suggested features in the Preferences. I see no problem with that. In the end it’s up to the users to decide. Personally I’m fine with keeping it on if that helps Mozilla earn additional money, and stay in the browser business for a bit longer providing an independent alternative to big-corps browsers. But also nothing prevent us from creating two ports one called Firefox keeping the original code in place, and another called BeZilla/HaikuFox/whatever-we-like having all the ads/analytics options turned off by default. We’ll add a description and let people decide freely.

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And that will be another port in HaikuPorts called Librewolf. Nothing wrong with having both, it’s the choice users of other OSes already have.

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Firefox immidiently calls home when you first open it (among other things by opening specific mozilla websites). There is no way around that without patching it.

Settings you can open after the fact are not enough.

I am really wondering what the point is of this? I am using Haiku because we don’t have tracking or analytics in part. Why port third party software that disrespects your privacy and then not patch it because you want to use some specific icon?

Haiku is prescriptive, really having the “good” option presented, without asking users to figure out such political or contentious issues. We can just patch what we want without having to follow the will of a corporation that has made it clear they don’t care about their users anymore… by firing most of their web browser staff and hiring advertisers instead.

Analytics don’t keep companies afloat unless they sell this data to targeted advertising. Is that your intention when keeping on analytisc?

In any case the only thing keeping mozilla afloat was the illegal search deal with google. With that gone all that is left is basically a slow death for the company.

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This definitely should be patched out if possible. What Mozilla is doing is outrageous.

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Check the post by humdinger at the top of this thread. It’s a great marketing thing for Haiku to have a well known browser running on it. I’m not sure why that even has to be explained after people were asking for two decades if there’s Firefox (or Chrome) for Haiku. If you or anyone else don’t want to install it because it calls home when you first open it, you don’t have too. Feel free to patch that and create a separate port called something else, or use WebPositive instead which is still the only official Haiku browser. But please don’t decide for all the users. Users on Linux/BSD can freely chose between Firefox and LibreWolf, there’s no reason to limit that choice on Haiku. I’m okay with running unmodified Firefox as I’m sure they comply with the GDPR rules and don’t collect or share my personal info without my consent.

p.s.: should we also patch IntelliJ IDEA for contacting JetBrains server? If you say yes, think about hundreds of plugins in their Marketplace that can possibly “call home” independently from the IDE.

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It’s a bit longer loop than that. I keep the analytics on, Mozilla knows which features are used, which should be improved because they’re missed by the users, and which can be safely removed because nobody ever touches them. They improve the browser → more people are happy with it → more installs → more money from the sponsors.

As I wrote in some other thread I’d be also happy to share the analytics data of my Haiku usage with the Haiku’s development team, to help you folks to figure out which part of the OS can/should be improved. Better UX → more happy users → more donations. I understand that might be not the way to go for everyone but as a software engineer myself, I’m always glad to help developers of open-source projects with the technical data to improve the product.

Nevermind,you can simply ask users what they think,there’s no need to violate their privacy and spy on them.
Bugtrackers exist and if something bothers a user,they will create a ticket for it.
Forums exist and allow users to discuss about ideas for improvements and new features.
And if you think about deprecating a product,you can start a survey if people still need the feature or not.
Maybe that’s oversimplified,but Haiku has worked without spyware for more than 20 years now and it’s more fun to use than any commercial OS.
The good thing here is that nobody has to make sponsors happy,we all code because we love it and want to improve Haiku for ourselves and anyone else who likes it.

Looking at the comments, I realise that our discussion has quickly derailed from the original topic (not blaming anyone, as I’m mainly guilty of letting it go there). The topic was about who, on behalf of the Haiku project, could and would contact Mozilla and ask what the requirements are for using the Firefox name.

As I understand one idea here is we don’t need to contact them at all, and we don’t want to use the Firefox name. Okay, I respect that point of view, even though I firmly disagree with it. Let’s see if there’re other thoughts.

p.s.: can we move Firefox tracking and other analytics-related discussion into a separate topic please?

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I don’t see why. It is very relevant to the discussion. Mozilla makes it clear on that page that if you alter firefox in any way that you can’t use the firefox trademark.

That explicitly includes default settings.

As for GDPR compliance, highly doubtfull. They already have a complaint lodged against them https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2024-09/C089%20Firefox%20Beschwerde%20Redacted.pdf

Yes, i’m sure it would hurt Haikus image greatly by having an unpatched firefox with tracking in it and then telling users “oh thats the spyware one! you should habe chosen the other one lol”

Nothing wrong with using for example the iceweasel name and slap a “based on firefox” in the package description.

It’s still the same software, and offers the same value of having it.

Opt-out analytics is unacceptable in either case.

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Because I would address some of the comments there, but I don’t want to derail this topic even more.

In the same way the presence of both Firefox and LibreWolf hurts image of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, right? Good to know, coz their communities are probably unaware of that damage.

Anyway, it is obvious that you and I are at different poles on this topic. Let’s agree to disagree.