History and origin of name Mozilla Foundation owns the trademark "Firefox" and claims the right to deny the use of the name and other trademarks to unofficial builds. The
Debian Free Software Guidelines are used by the Debian project to determine whether a license is a free license, which in turn is used to determine whether something can be included in Debian. As the logo did not meet these requirements, it could not be used by software which was to be included in Debian. This effect of the Mozilla trademark policy led to a long debate within the
Debian Project in 2004 and 2005. During this debate, the name "Iceweasel" was coined to refer to rebranded versions of Firefox. The first known use of the name in this context is by Nathanael Nerode, in reply to Eric Dorland's suggestion of "Icerabbit". It was intended as a parody of "Firefox". "Iceweasel" was subsequently used as the example name for a rebranded Firefox in the Mozilla Trademark Policy, and became the most commonly used name for a hypothetical rebranded version of Firefox. By January 1, 2005, such strategic rebranding had come to be referred to as the "Iceweasel route". The term "ice weasel" appeared earlier in a line which
Matt Groening fictionally attributed to
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." Debian was initially given permission to use the trademarks, and adopted the Firefox name. However, because the artwork in Firefox had a proprietary copyright license which was not compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, the substituted logo had to remain.
Trademark agreement revocation In February 2006, Mike Connor, representing the
Mozilla Corporation, wrote to the Debian bug tracker and informed the project that Mozilla did not consider the way in which Debian was using the Firefox name to be acceptable. The "Iceweasel" name was revived in the Debian community as a possible name to give the rebranded version of Firefox. The Iceweasel found in Debian is not GNU IceWeasel (now
GNU IceCat), but rather a rebranded Firefox created by the Debian project. The Debian maintainer has stated that he will "get in touch with [the GNU IceCat/IceWeasel team] to see what we can do together". Similarly, Debian renamed Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey to Icedove and Iceape, respectively.
Rebranding According to the
Debian Package Tracking System, Iceweasel, Icedove, and Iceape were first accepted into the
Debian project's
unstable repository on November 20, 2006, on October 14, 2006, and on December 1, 2006, respectively. Icedove migrated to Etch and Thunderbird was removed on November 11, 2006. Iceape migrated to Etch on January 11, 2007 (the old Mozilla suite having previously been removed on October 6, 2006). Iceweasel migrated (and Firefox was removed) on January 18, 2007. Debian's first stable release to include Iceweasel, Icedove, and Iceape was Debian 4.0 (Etch), released April 8, 2007. Soon after the renaming Debian also replaced Mozilla's unbranded logos with new logos designed to fit with the new names, drawn by Ricardo Fernandez Fuentes.
User agent Some web sites do not recognize the browsers'
user agent strings and refuse to work properly. As a workaround, Iceweasel 3.5.5 adds a "like
Firefox x.x.x" string to the user agent.
Firefox issue resolution In June 2013, the practise of backporting security fixes into Iceweasel ended, in favour of serving the latest versions of Firefox ESR (in rebranded form) to Debian 7 and later. As described by Sylvestre Ledru in a bug in the Debian bug tracking system, Mozilla and Debian agreed on renaming Iceweasel to Firefox. Mozilla recognizes that Debian potential changes are not impacting the quality of the release. Debian users who performed a in June 2016 received the following system message. According to Chris Hoffman of
PC World, "After a decade, Debian and Mozilla are burying the hatchet. Iceweasel is about to re-assume its proper name". iceweasel (45.0esr-1) unstable; urgency=medium * The iceweasel package was replaced with the firefox-esr package. * Preferences under /etc/iceweasel/prefs will need to be copied manually to /etc/firefox-esr. * Other customizations under /etc/iceweasel will need additional manual steps, through CCK2 or addons. The developers of
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre picked up the Iceweasel project and it continues to be maintained. == Licensing ==