I highly doubt that Haiku would lose anything by skipping the Firefox name. As mentioned, you could have “Firefox-derived browser” in the description, plus all the tech sites will probably just say that “Haiku has ported Firefox” anyway, regardless of how the packagers decide to name it.
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Please, let’s choose BeZilla (to continue with the legacy) and remove all the spyware and adware crap.
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One of the selling point of Haiku is “we don’t track our users”. So, what you are saying here is we should give up this selling point (and the users that came because of it) to attract another category of users who just want to use the apps they know from other systems.
It is a bigger question than you seem to think.
I think yes, as a contributor to Haikuports, I try to be careful about what I package, and if I worked on such tools, I would certainly do this. Because some users trust us with what we said about not tracking our users, and it is important to them.
I think they took a shortcut:
They add data spying → they sell the data → more money from the sponsors.
It is not up to the Haiku project to do this. It is up to people working on the Firefox port and/or people packaging it in Haikuports. Neither of these are managed by the Haiku project. So, whatever they decide to do, will happen, and the Haiku project cannot really do anything about it. We don’t have control on what apps exist and are distributed (and that’s a good thing).
From Haikuports side, it will just be a question of wether the license and trademark policy allow it or not. From the people porting and packaging Firefox, it’s their personal decision how they decide to distribute it, with or without patches, and with or without the official branding.
In any case, the distribution policy from Mozilla is very clear:
If you have modified source files (or even minor things such as configuration), you need permission from Mozilla to use the Firefox trademark. It makes little sense to ask for this before there is a decision on what kind of modification should be made (“just a port”, or changing some other things). Otherwise, you would just have to ask them again every week as things are patched in and out.
So the conclusion would be: let’s first get the thing up and running under another name, and when we have done that, tell Mozilla: we have done this, is it ok for you to put the Firefox name on it?
And I expect that, besides the questions about patching out some features, they will have something to say about the usability and stability as well. They may not want their name on an experimental version with crashes or missing features.
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“One of the selling point of Haiku is “we don’t track our users”. S”
you worry about firefox spying on its users,
when Haiku itself is so insecure?
PulkoMandyDeveloper
In Haiku everything is running as the root user, so any vulnerability will have catastrophic consequences (whole unrestricted access to the machine). There are several known bugs and there were no security audit. So if you are worried about this, I recommend using a more serious operating system which put at least some effort in fixing security issues.
So what? I can warn about the OS being potentially insecure, and also be unhappy about an application intentionally and openly extracting data.
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If you’re using Haiku, you’re aware of some risks and you can reduce them. For example, if you live alone and only need connexion to update the system these risks are low.
When you’re using a spyware, you’re not always aware that it is one. Even when you are, you don’t really know what it will share. As a result you can’t take measures that would lower risks.
I agree with @PulkoMandy. These 2 look like 2 different things to me.
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Thank you for the answer. After 20+ comments someone finally addressed the points I mentioned in the original post. Though at this point I can just rename the topic to “Tracking in the 3rd-party apps” and enjoy the derailment =)
That’s not what I’m saying, and I’m not sure how you (and apparently some others people here) derived that meaning from my comments. First of all, you write “the selling point of Haiku”, but I’m not suggesting changes for Haiku operating system here. I’m talking about Firefox. And Firefox, InteliiJ, or AnyOtherApp is not Haiku. Do you want to say that Haiku wants to extend the promise “to not track our users” to all the apps that has been ported or will ever be ported to Haiku in the future? I guess not, because that idea contradicts the second part of your comment:
Now, wrt the IntelliJ case:
The thing is you cannot prevent it just by patching IntelliJ itself. I mentioned their Marketplace for a reason. While the IntelliJ itself has an opt-in tracking policy for their releases (and opt-out policy for their preview builds), it has no way to enforce the policy on the plugins that the user can download from the Marketplace inside the IDEA. In that way it reminds Haiku and the apps from HaikuPorts. While Haiku guarantees it doesn’t track anything, no such guarantee can be made regarding the third-party apps, and it’s up to the user to make their choice.
I don’t think it contradicts anything.
I said the Haiku project is not in control of the applications. But then we can talk about the policies at Haikuports, and also about my personal opinion about these things.
And I have clearly said “as a contributor to HaikuPorts” when replying to the part about IntelliJ (because, yes, it is not part of the Haiku project, but there is significant overlap in the teams running it).
Anyway, the solution for me is simple: I indeed do not use IntelliJ, and I trust vim plugins to generally not have any tracking. And I can also say, that’s the point of this discussion, that, personally, for me, I would rather use a renamed version of Firefox with tracking disabled, than a version with the official name that sends data to Mozilla, uses Google as the default search engine, tries to sell me other Mozilla services like Pocket, and so on.
Now, I’m not the one making the decision in the end. But I can still say these things. You don’t have to put more weight into it because I happen to contribute to Haiku, you can read me here just as a potential user of this new web browser. But, as a developer, I’m also interested in what happens of the software I have written and how it is used, even if I fully accept that it is free software, anyone can use it for whatever they want, and I have no control of it. I can still agree or disagree 
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I think this is the best solution, actually. “Iceweasel” is already a known name in the Linux community, and then we save the “BeZilla” name (or a name like it) for if/when the port becomes native again rather than using GTK.
Well, this isn’t really true at present, since it’s the Haiku project and Haiku, Inc. that sponsor the binary HaikuPorts repository.
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Sponsoring is not the same as having control, I think?
But the lack of clearly established governance at haikuports means it could very well be “swallowed” by Haiku (wether this is a good or a bad thing).
Since some critical Haiku dependencies are shipped at Haikuports Haiku has an interest in controlling that directly, at least in parts. There is a lot of overlap between both. If you want Haikuports to be “truely” third party software (and mostly independent) the OS dependencies have to be removed from it and maintained somewhere else.
I never mind other person contact and ask these question to mozilla. I am curious about how they answer to these question if I don’t have to communicate in somewhat formal inquiry like this. Remember I am not good at English.
I personally am interested in when I can use this port daily to me. I don’t have enough development skill and time both keeping the port up-to-date and privacy and security customize for Haiku. So for such work needs someone steps up the role.
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They are stored in a separate repository hosted by Haiku. So, they are built from haikuports recipes, but they are mirrored to handle incompatibility between haikuports rolling release way of doing things, and Haiku beta releases versioning.
This is not a discussion about what I want, but only about how things are currently.
And yes, you can consider that Haiku depending on a small set of HaikuPorts recipes and the haikuports tool is a risk to Haiku. Or you can consider that it doesn’t really matter because it’s largely the same people in both teams, and even if it isn’t, we can have discussions and collaboration between two projects.
In fact, this is probably an easier place to collaborate than, say, freetype, or ICU, or OpenSSL, for which we have to handle ABI breakage or other problems on our own when/if they happen. So HaikuPorts is not the one I would worry about first in this context?
Anyway, now we’re getting really off-topic
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Chiming in with this take on the situation so far:
- It is important to get mainline Firefox to accept Haiku patches, which includes asking Mozilla if any patches and port quality are okay for using their trademarks.
- Having the bare minimum patches needed for Haiku support in upstream Firefox means it is easier for downstream web browsers to subsequently work on Haiku and support it. Some of these downstreams are:
- Librewolf
- Floorp
- Waterfox
- Zen Browser
- FireDragon
- Firefox still has quite the brand recognition, which would be more beneficial than not to see on Haiku in any official or authorised capacity.
heh
At this point, this topic has gone far past derailment and has careened off the cliff. 
On my side, I would be pragmatic on that topic.
Do we have today the port completed ? No, not yet.
So until we have something packaged and available via HaikuPort, why not taking the existing BeZilla name and once we know more about this package versus the official gecko-dev repo (ie what will be patched/modified versus the official version), so we can decide which name will best reflect this “finalized” version for Haiku.
I have also discovered there’s an existing HVIF icon available on Haiku Depot for BeZilla :
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That’s why I was asking (and flagging to) the moderators to move the tracking discussion to a separate topic, when the derailment had just started. Oh well…
Hi all, apologies for the late response. But yeah, as @PulkoMandy has said, it would be up to whoever is currently working on the port of Firefox or whoever’s in charge of packaging at Haikuports. I don’t think it would be efficient/helpful for anyone not directly involved in the port (myself included) to reach out to Mozilla, as it’s likely that Mozilla would want to know more about the technical aspects of the port and maybe make some requests for changes, so it’s better if the maintainer of the port initiates contact.
I agree with the idea of using either BeZilla or one of the other suggested names as the port’s name. Calling something “Firefox” when it isn’t officially affiliated/endorsed with Mozilla is probably a risky thing to do, and it provides some time for discussion to work out whether it would be beneficial for Haiku and its users to make the port official. And if most people agree that the port shouldn’t be made official, then we already have an established name in use.
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I will choose this course when the port debuts on HaikuPorts.
By preserving the memorial BeZilla package available we can play with that easily. And easy to compare and evaluate how our port lacks integration that BeZilla already achieved.
Other reasonings to choose the name is logical and sane.
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