Did anyone see this story on Firefox?

[bidi]

If Debian breaks the kernel, its their distro suffers. If they break Firefox, firefox suffers (you'll see another microsoft "get the crap campaign").

Even though I agree with your post for the most part, this statement makes no sense. Either way Debian would suffer (not for long I might add).

That's like saying if I break my arm on a wall I will suffer, but if I break my arm on the chair the chair will suffer. (I know bad analogy, but your statement still makes no sense)

For one thing, Debian has a way better "stable" release criteria than Firefox, so if any instabilities are introduced it will only be on the Unstable branch which will be squashed very quickly. When Debian upgraded from XFree to Xorg in Testing the configuration got broken for a really long time (a few days) yet I did not see Xorg suffer. Ubuntu had a similar experience with X a few weeks ago, and I didn't see Xorg suffer either. When ever a distro breaks something they are the ones who suffer, not the software, this has always been the case... people never associate the problem with the software (since it works on other distros with no problem).

Either way, I've always thought competition is a good thing, even if it is FOSS vs FOSS. Look at XFree and Xorg, that was a fork and everyone now uses Xorg! I'm sure there are other examples where the fork has advanced better than the original. BMW has a great comercial describing this: "Idea killers!" You will never know if IceWeazel is better than Firefox until you try it, and who knows, some day it might even become more popular than Firefox. What if someday IceWeazel become more popular? Are you just going to take Pat's (from Slackware) way out and call it "not stable enough" (love the distro, but since when is the 2.6 series not ready for primetime)? The point is that you, just like I and everyone else in the world, don't know what's going to happen in the future!

[Vergil83]

5 reasons to kill IceWeasel here.

I am sorry but those arguments sucked.
1)It has been said many times in this forum (and agreed by most) that Linux is not a windows replacement, it is different.

2)Says you. I have stopped using firefox (except on windows) because it is becoming a memory hog (I don't care if it is a "feature").

3)Why should debian back down and not firefox?

4)Ad hominem

5)FSF didn't come up with Iceweasel. The person is just making stuff up.