debian's Iceweasel is a little squabble about the logo not being licensed correctly. they only divert official version to add the -debianXXX when they backport security patches on the stable branch. They never removed anything. apart from branding. They even upstreamed the branding agnostic flags so they don't have to change even that!
FDroid's fork is now a move against binary blobs. And copious tracking. They are taking back firefox (pun intended). From the announce: "It removes the proprietary binaries out of the official builds." [emphasis mine]
There was already discussion on the community when mozilla decided to make the, then optional by effort of contributors, google play api on the android build... just so a really small portion of users could share youtube videos to chrome cast (like anyone uses firefox to watch videos they care so much they want to see on the TV...). Everyone reaching the IRC on how to build without the proprietary google dependency was ignored. But some soldiered on. There was even a PaleMoon build on the play store just for that! (palemoon were mostly to avoid the new australis UI, which breaks lots of OS usability/accessibility features just to copy chrome).
Now, on top of the google play api (which now is not just for chrome cast, but also for tracking. ha! didn't see that coming did you?) they added adobe DRM, which will probably reach android soon.
I sure do hope that incite the rest of the community as it incites me. I've been running fennec build laboriously myself on my phones for a while. And i hope i now have the time to stop that nonsense and contribute to fdroid's effort somehow. Even if just by bitching... err promoting on forums.
The logo copyright licensing was fixed years ago. The reason Debian still ships Iceweasel is that they do not have permission to use the Firefox trademarks. IIRC, to get permission, they would either have to use unmodified binaries as shipped by Mozilla or submit every build to Mozilla for approval. Something like that. In fact I was surprised that F-Droid was able to ship something called "Firefox".
You seem to be implying that Debian's Iceweasel package contains binary blobs. That shouldn't be the case, could you clarify that please? It's true though that Debian doesn't have policies about software using non-free network services and user tracking.
> FDroid's fork is now a move against binary blobs. And copious tracking. They are taking back firefox (pun intended). From the announce: "It removes the proprietary binaries out of the official builds." [emphasis mine]
What's the nearest thing for general Linux? I'm guessing Tor Browser without Tor?
I didn't see anything specific in Arch/AUR repositories.
I hope Debian's iceweasel will eventually serve that purpose. Stable is still on 31, so it will be interesting to see how 38+ shows up there. maybe looking at what happen on sid will already show something (sorry, i'm not following sid for a couple years now :(
Edit: What makes people think Firefox has been removed?
Correct. I've been using Fennec (the custom build) ever since the team managed to get it to build, and have had zero complaints.
As far as I'm aware, that is the last upstream binary in the official F-Droid repository.
Keep in mind, anyone is free to make their own F-Droid repository using the fdroidserver software. The server supports either building apks from source, or adding binary apks (ala Firefox). There is nothing special about the repository at f-droid.org/repo other than it being preconfigured in the client. But hey, if you really wanted, you could build the client yourself with different default repositories, because that is also open source :
It's no different that Debian with Iceweasel.