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Guix tips : Icecat dark mode

2022-10-28

Icecat ?

Icecat[1] is a web browser based on Firefox. Here, quoted from the GNU website:

GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend nonfree software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license imposes requirements for the distribution of modified versions that make it inconvenient to exercise freedom 3.

This browser comes with privacy protection features and some extensions already installed:

LibreJS: GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman's article The JavaScript Trap.
Https-Everywhere: Extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure.
SpyBlock: Blocks privacy trackers while in normal browsing mode, and all third party requests when in private browsing mode. Based on Adblock Plus.
AboutIceCat: Adds a custom “about:icecat” homepage with links to information about the free software and privacy features in IceCat, and checkboxes to enable and disable the ones more prone to break websites.
Fingerprinting countermeasures: Fingerprinting is a series of techniques allowing to uniquely identify a browser based on specific characterisics of that particular instance (like what fonts are available in that machine). Unlike cookies, the user cannot opt-out of being tracked this way; so the browser has to avoid giving away these kinds of hints.

Icecat

Dark mode

Even if you setup Icecat to be dark and to ask for dark web pages, you will be disapointed. The fingerprinting countermeasures will not allow icecat to go to the dark side.

At the end, if you can't surf the internet without the dark mode and want to use Icecat, you will have to disable the fingerprint countermeasures and go to "about:config", search for the key "privacy.resistFingerprinting" and set it to false. And, voilà "Welcome to the dark side!".

So, dark mode and privacy seem to can’t stand together. What a pity!

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