Apparently, the firefox logo and name have to be considered “non-free” by Debian. The mozilla foundation only allows use of the firefox brand for “official” builds, and Debian tends to add patches to applications to fix bugs without waiting for upstream to do this. So Debian packages aren’t an unmodified firefox build.

(Mozilla Foundation trademark policy)

Of course the Mozilla foundation won’t object to the kind of modifications Debian did, probably not consider them “serious”; but Debian is meant to be used by others (e.g. Ubuntu) to build their own distributions. These in turn will probably not be tolerated in the same way (and might want to do “serious” modifications).

Anyway, Debian has been using a plain “world” icon for firefox for some time, now it seems we’ll have to change the name, too.

A couple of names has been proposed, including “iceweasel”, “firechicken” and “freefox”. I definitely like the last one best, since it’s very clear about being related to firefox, but more free.

I wonder if we can use “Firefox” at least in the User-Agent string. Other browsers have been using “Mozilla” there for a long time, too.