I followed this helpful guide because Iceweasel is a waste of time for me.

This TOTAL NONSENSE about Iceweasel being ‘exactly the same as Firefox’ has got to stop. The information is false and misleading. Iceweasel IS NOT ‘just Firefox rebranded’. Iceweasel has A LOT of bugs which cause it to crash (especially when more than 5 tabs are open), it does not work with most Firefox plugins, it does not work well with Flash. Iceweasel and Firefox provide completely different user experiences on the internet.

I have tried Iceweasel at least ten times on three different computers over the last two years, always sucked back in by the promise that it has been updated – only to find that it still ‘works’ in the way Firefox used to work about 5 years ago, when it would crash because of Flash or Javascript on a site. Iceweasel may well be the same as an OLD version of Firefox, but it doesn’t compare with the latest Firefox.

I have found that Konqueror, Chromium, Google Chrome, and even Arora all work better than Iceweasel in terms of crashing less often, being able to access more websites and having less noticeable bugs. I would rather use Dillo or w3m than Iceweasel now.

So please, commenters, stop telling people that Iceweasel is the same as Firefox. If you must compare them, let people know that Iceweasel is the same as an OLD Firefox without plugin functionality.

And yes, I HAVE filed bug reports (under a different username), and I DO try to help out with the project, because I think Iceweael has good aims. It just isn’t very useable yet, except for accessing Wikipedia, search engines and web pages from the mid 1990s.

So, again, thank you for this guide. As of today, there is still a strong necessity for an average web user to choose Firefox over Iceweasel. I hope one day the situation can be reversed.

“Let somebody build firefox packages under non-free. Fuck, even the mozilla corp has offered to maintain these for them under volatile”

I still may. The fact that Mozilla has offered to supply and Debian has stopped them makes this installation laughable. Seriously, you want me to use FireFox/IceWeasel(whatever!) 3.5.16! WTF, this isn’t 2010 (that’s when 3.5.16 was released, WTF has Debian been doing for 2 years… I just went to the Mozilla page only to be greeted with a warning that I’m using an ancient browser) , every other sane operating system I run is running 7 … 4 major version numbers behind is just too far for me and I use almost all of the features introduced since then, so don’t say they are the same because it is not true. And as for the identification string, this is not a location for branding it is a location for identifying, if you claim to be the same then post the same id.

Thanks Mike and all the other packages for Debian… I think you all seem to do a wonderful job, but if this does not work I will be leaving Debian over this one. Still might have to, I don’t want to admit that I had to do this!

As for the whole, purist thing. Whatever floats someones boat.

On another note however Iceweasel does have some problems with major sites like CNN or so I read some place, apparently you can’t use Iceweasel with some official sites because they don’t support it ;(

“1. The back front reload buttons are not seen in Firefox”

I too had this problem and the way I fixed it was to right click the panel
select customize
click use default set
close customization and they appear between the url bar and the google quicksearch bar

yeah its funny
but people do have a point. debian has crawled right up its own and Richard Stallman’s, arse with all this fundamentalism, and now we have the absolutely astounding sight of debian actually making it so difficult to install proprietory non-free nvidia drivers that most converts from windows wont even touch debian. how ironic is that? a system which directly opposes the very being of of windows operating system couldnt give a rats ass what its users do when they give up windows and go to linux. Lets face it even most linux users wouldnt touch debian with a barge pole mainly because of the snotty nosed debian fanatics that look down their noses at anyone who hasnt been using linux for a decade.
I am afraid that it really wont be long before all thats left of debian is a few sycophantic know-it-alls and a couple of bizarrely deluded geniuses that wished theyd have realised sooner that richard stallman is completely batshit insane