The road to Cryolite

Firefox emerged from the Mozilla suite and grew into the last major independent engine: Gecko. The Extended Support Release branch gives the world a slow, security-maintained Firefox that enterprises and derivatives can ride for months at a time. It is the foundation everything below stands on.

The FSF's answer to Firefox's trademark and freedom problems. Originally “IceWeasel” (2006, by GNU IceCat maintainer Ruben Rodriguez's predecessor work), renamed IceCat in 2008. Since IceCat 60 the entire browser is produced by the makeicecat script in the gnuzilla repository: it takes Mozilla's own ESR sourceball, verifies it against Mozilla's release key, applies GNU patches — free-license enforcement for shipped extensions, LibreJS, privacy defaults, removal of proprietary talking points — and rebrands mechanically. Same idea Cryolite runs with: a fork is a script, not a place.

IceCat releases track Firefox ESR: when Mozilla ships 140.xesr, gnuzilla tags v140.x-gnu1.

Cryolite is a direct fork of GNU IceCat, continuing that living pipeline with a security/stability-first mindset and the same release discipline as its Chromium sibling Fluorite:

• fresh tree every cycle, pinned to the newest vX.Y.Z-gnuN gnuzilla tag
• scripted rebrand pass (one audited script, mirroring upstream's own technique)
• discrete, reviewable patch layer — no snowballing drift
• official release configuration builds, smoke-gated before promotion
• weekly ESR security watch with automatic out-of-cycle respins