What is Cryolite?

Cryolite is GNU IceCat — itself Firefox ESR with the GNU freedom layer — rebuilt from a pristine source tree at a pinned upstream tag, carrying a scripted rebrand and a small reviewed patch layer, compiled with the official release configuration, smoke-tested, and promoted as versioned artifacts. It is part of the AcreetionOS ecosystem.

The name comes from the mineral: cryolite (“ice stone”, from Greek kryos) is a Greenlandic mineral that is nearly invisible in water and glows with a snowy luster under light — and its name carries the same ice as the cat it forked. A mineral sibling to Fluorite; an icy nod to IceCat.

1. A fork is a pipeline, not a place

Cryolite has no precious tree. Every cycle the old tree and binaries are deleted outright and rebuilt from scratch at the newest gnuzilla tag. If the machine dies tomorrow, the entire project can be reconstructed from scripts plus one tag number.

2. Security is a schedule, not a scramble

Cycles run every 42 days by design. In between, an automated watcher compares the pinned ESR base against Mozilla's published ESR feed weekly. A newer ESR release triggers an out-of-cycle respin instead of waiting for the calendar.

3. Rebrands are scripts, patches are guests

The mechanical name swap is one audited script — the same approach upstream makeicecat takes. Everything else lives as discrete patches that must justify themselves each cycle. Nothing hides in years of accumulated drift.

4. Freedoms first, always

Everything GNU IceCat stands for stays: free-software licenses for shipped extensions, LibreJS, no proprietary bits, trademark-honest naming. Hardening on top must never cost freedom.

5. Your data is yours — and outside the tree

Launch with a dedicated --profile directory. The build tree is disposable; your browsing life is not.

6. Honesty over marketing

This site documents what the pipeline actually does today. No roadmap theater, no fake checksums, no invented release dates. The tooling is real and inspectable.

Cryolite is one half of AcreetionOS's browser effort. Fluorite covers the Chromium side (continuing Bromite & Cromite); Cryolite covers the Gecko side (continuing Firefox & IceCat). Same pipeline philosophy, same 42-day cadence, same security watch, different engine.

Both browsers are built for AcreetionOS but run anywhere a Firefox or Chromium build runs on linux/x86_64.