Debian parodies, Iceweasel and Icedove

Few days back while going through an article about new Knoppix 5.3.0 I came upon the two familiar but unheard tools i.e. Iceweasel and Icedove, both followed by the names Firefox & Thunderbird 2.0 in brackets respectively. For a moment I began to muse about when did these two names came into existence for the two most popular open source internet tools. After a little googling and going through wikipedia I got my answer.

Mozilla corporation holds trademark for name Firefox and its logo. Unofficial releases of Firefox can’t use the same unless they use the binaries supplied by Mozilla or have special permission. If none of the two conditions satisfies then one must compile the source with an option that gives the generated binaries code-name of the release version of the Firefox on which it is based, and which doesn’t use the official logo or any other artwork.

Iceweasel and Icedove are the re-branded version of Firefox and Thunderbird maintained by Debian. Debian guidelines, commonly known as Debian Free Software Guidelines, states that all parts of Debian distribution should be modifiable by those who use it. This conflicts with the licensing and strict guidelines of Mozilla Trademark Policy. As a result Debian forked the development of Firefox & Thunderbird projects with new names together with some extra features and a logo which is freely licensed.

Firefox loading blank pages

I had been facing this weird firefox problem for quite a few days in my linux box (Ubuntu 7.04 - the Feisty Fawn). After connecting to my ISP and browsing for few minutes suddenly all the URL requests were ending up in blank pages. Earlier I thought this was a problem with my ISP. But when I noticed that messenger and all the command-line tools (wget, lynx etc.) were working fine I understood that actual problem was something else. Considering the presence of some bug I first tried to upgrade the firefox (v2.0.08 to v2.0.0.11). Unfortunately this didn't solve the problem. I tried analyzing the http response headers using wget but couldn't gain much. Ultimately I had to resort to lynx with yahoo search as google was also dying with "400 Bad Request" message. After one or two attempts I got its solution in a forum. The problem was occurring with the pages responding with http 302 status. Some people also mentioned to experience the same problem with pages using script based redirection. Anyhow, the reason for this was attributed to some buggy firefox extension. With this knowledge it was easy to resolve the problem. Trying disabling each firefox extension one by one. I was too desperate to fix the issue ASAP, so I disabled all the extensions in one go. Voila! it worked and everything restored back to normal.