IceCat

Today I was watching Stallman, someone asked him which browser he recommends and it's IceCat, so I gave it a spin.

Running IceCat 60.7.0 on Debian 10, opening lichess.org consistently hangs the browser without anything shown in the tab until I force quit. Other sites load fine.

Let me know if there are questions.

Interesting, apparently en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat still has an active maintainer since whatever time RMS gave the talk you referenced.

The elephant in the room is, "Why does the browser hang?" although it's possible that nobody is able to answer that.

On Debian 10 does Vivaldi provide a better experience?

@Toadofsky For me on Debian 10 , Vivaldi and Firefox are only the browsers from which lichess works perfectly.

Thanks, that's valuable context... dang, I can't call this a Firefox issue or a Debian issue. I guess I'll have to install IceCat unless someone smarter than me figures it out first.

Actually it's a universal linux problem as per me .. it didn't either work on ubuntu or mint and fedora. My Ram , processor and all hardware is quite up to date.

GNU IceCat hasn't received an update in more than 2 years.
It keeps hanging on me, whatever the website, on Debian 11.

If you want a similar experience you can use Firefox (IceCat was based upon Firefox), disable mozilla telemetry, enable tracking protection, set duckduckgo as the default search engine and use the following extensions:

- https everywhere
- libre js and/or noscript
- ublock origin

To be as close as possible to GNU IceCat you could could check about:config in IceCat and replicate those settings in Firefox.

Cheers to you for running free software <3

Well, this is curious... perhaps github.com/losuler/icecat will update soon?

> Update GNU IceCat to 91.2.0 HEAD master
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/commit/?id=1537880dac3087d3779543303f0df83432831166

> 60.7.0 60.7.0 2 June 2019
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat#Version_history

Yes

wikipedia is weird. it also says:
> Stable release(s) 78.12.0 (14 July 2021; 2 months ago)

I would recommend Librewolf. It's preconfigured, and is actively maintained. The only problem is that the piece animations are jittery.