Debian replaces Iceweasel with Firefox on March 10, 2016

Today I ran my regular debian full-update only to find this crazy message:

W: Failed to fetch http://mozilla.debian.net/dists/jessie-backports/Release: Unable to find expected entry 'iceweasel-release/binary-amd64/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)

And surprisingly, the news reported that Debian has replaced Iceweasel (unbranded-Firefox) with officially branded Firefox.

Reference: http://news.softpedia.com/news/debian-is-switching-to-mozilla-firefox-after-a-decade-of-using-iceweasel-501647.shtml

Reference: https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3622

What did this mean? It means that what we’ve come to be accustomed to was suddenly different, but not all that much. I re-located the “Debian Mozilla team” web-page (http://mozilla.debian.net/) and proceded to make changes.

I chose the “release” version of Firefox. I considered the “Extended Support Release” (ESR), which I’d normally opt for, but figured what the heck – I try to live with Mozilla’s continuous “improvements”. For this, I sudo edited my /etc/apt/sources.list (or /etc/apt/sources.d/*.list) and and was sure to remove any references to the old iceweasel packages. I added deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ jessie-backports firefox-release as instructed by the “Debian Mozilla team” page.

I then ran sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude -t jessie-backports install firefox to install.

After fixing my xfce4-panel launcher, replacing Iceweasel with Firefox, and verifying browser configs were in-tact, I chose to uninstall iceweasel with sudo aptitude remove iceweasel because it will no longer be updated as such. You will find it also wants to uninstall any xul-ext-* packages you may have installed. I tend to install add-ons manually anyway, so this was okay for me.

You might test the the apt-get/aptitude -t option for testing, unstable, or jessie-backports repositories for updated versions of the add-ons, but i’ll leave that to you. For more information on backports, please reference the instructions link from http://backports.debian.org/. (For testing and unstable, you also need to add such repositories, but you know that already, right.)

When all is done, you will of course find Firefox all the exact same as your Iceweasel except now it is branded with Firefox Icons and such. Big woop.

As always, good luck.

Please consider crypto tipping: