Why I suddenly don't think Firefox is great at all anymore
Enverex
Worcester, UK Icrontian
(other than the fact that it's become kinda slow and bulky these days).
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-502991.html
In short: Mozilla have said that no distrobutions of Linux (Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc) can apply any patches to Mozilla (for any reason) and still be allowed to call Firefox "Firefox". Now that may not seem like much of an issue if you don't know Linux, but it is, simply because most distros need to apply patches of somesort to get Firefox to compile/run in the first place. Mozilla Foundation have said patches can be sent upstream for them to add, but as you can imagine, that takes so long that you'll be many months behind.
So distros are now being forced to change the name to alternatives, like "IceWeasel" because they aren't allowed to call it FireFox after applying patches to make it work.
Why is all this happening? Trademarks and money. Google pays Mozilla Foundation a lot of money for Google to be the default search engine and I mean MILLIONS (remember Mozilla complained about not being allowed to use Google for their search when packaged with something a while back? This was why they wanted to do it so badly). They claim they'll lose their trademark if patches are added (despite the fact they are added to pretty much every application in Linux distros).
So as you see, when people get greedy, the whole thing all falls apart and the nice wonderful free browser based on good values... isn't really very great afterall.
Money corrupts indeed.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-502991.html
In short: Mozilla have said that no distrobutions of Linux (Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc) can apply any patches to Mozilla (for any reason) and still be allowed to call Firefox "Firefox". Now that may not seem like much of an issue if you don't know Linux, but it is, simply because most distros need to apply patches of somesort to get Firefox to compile/run in the first place. Mozilla Foundation have said patches can be sent upstream for them to add, but as you can imagine, that takes so long that you'll be many months behind.
So distros are now being forced to change the name to alternatives, like "IceWeasel" because they aren't allowed to call it FireFox after applying patches to make it work.
Why is all this happening? Trademarks and money. Google pays Mozilla Foundation a lot of money for Google to be the default search engine and I mean MILLIONS (remember Mozilla complained about not being allowed to use Google for their search when packaged with something a while back? This was why they wanted to do it so badly). They claim they'll lose their trademark if patches are added (despite the fact they are added to pretty much every application in Linux distros).
So as you see, when people get greedy, the whole thing all falls apart and the nice wonderful free browser based on good values... isn't really very great afterall.
Money corrupts indeed.
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