Free Software Directory:IceCat WebExtensions (proposed)/About

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The addons.mozilla.org website, hosted on Mozilla servers, offers many addons to extend FireFox with additional features. The majority of these addons are not developed directly by Mozilla but by third party developers. Many of these addons don't explicitly define a license, even if the original author thought it was unnecessary, so they can't be considered Free Software. Because of this issue, the GNU IceCat browser can't advise users to install and use them, in general.

From https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/directory.git/tree/addons.mozilla.org-fsd/README.md :

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About this project

This project has been developed to syncronize addons.mozilla.org (AMO)
WebExtension entries that is compatible with IceCat (version 60+) to
the Free Software Directory entries
(https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:IceCat), example
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/librejs/ with
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/LibreJS. For more about IceCat see the
`About IceCat` section and read the `About WebExtensions` section to
find out why legacy add-ons are excluded.

Icedove add-ons is not synced yet because Thunderbird still hasn't
implemented WebExtension support, but it's discussed by the Mozilla
developers, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1396172
For more about Icedove see the `About Icedove` section.

This script uses the Mozilla add-on API
(https://addons-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/api/addons.html),
and decides what to do with add-ons distributed under a free
license. A lot of developers have added a license on the
addons.mozilla.org page for their add-on but are not aware of the
common guidelines to make their programs fully free because Mozilla
never informed them about it. Common issues:
* COPYING or LICENSE file in the root directory for example.
* There are no (full) license notices in the non-trivial source files

Add-ons that doesn't have these issues will get generated XML files
that can be synced to the Free Software Directory while add-ons that
has these issues will generated on a list so we can contact the
developers and ask them to fix them.

I've decided to set the uppder limit for WebExtensions to have 10 000
daily users or more so we have a chance to work on the most relevant
add-ons since there are many thousands of add-ons on
addons.mozilla.org. However a few add-ons that has less than 10 000
daily users are highly relevant (for example
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/librejs/ at this
writing) so the script will be able to include add-ons from customized
so called Collections from addons.mozilla.org (example,
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/DavidHedlund/)
where they can be managed, or from a simple text document that lists
the addons.mozilla.org URL's.

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About addons.mozilla.org

Mozilla's description: "Addons.mozilla.org (AMO), is Mozilla's
official site for discovering and installing add-ons for the Firefox
browser. Add-ons help you modify and personalize your browsing
experience by adding new features to Firefox, enhancing your
interactions with Web content, and changing the way your browser
looks.

You can also use AMO to find add-ons for Mozilla Thunderbird and
SeaMonkey." - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/about

#####################################################################
About WebExtensions

GNU IceCat 60 is based on Firefox ESR 60 which is the first Firefox
ESR version based on Firefox Quantum (Firefox 57+). Firefox Quantum
removed support for legacy add-ons and only run WebExtension
add-ons. WebExtensions is a new browser extension compatible with the
extensions APIs of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

#####################################################################
About GNU IceCat

IceCat is the unbranded version of Firefox ESR.

GNU IceCat aim to be based on the the current official release of
Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) with removal of trademarked
artwork and proprietary components.

However, IceCat is not a straight fork of Firefox ESR; instead, it is
a parallel effort that works closely with and re-bases in
synchronization on the latest Firefox ESR as the upstream supplier,
with patches merged upstream whenever possible; although it should be
noted that additional security updates are customized to IceCat
occasionally.

#####################################################################
About Icedove

Icedove is the unbranded version of Thunderbird.


Short description

The addons.mozilla.org website, hosted on Mozilla servers, offers many addons to extend FireFox with additional features. The majority of these addons are not developed directly by Mozilla but by third party developers.

Many of these addons don't explicitly define a license, even if the original author thought it was unnecessary, so they can't be considered Free Software. Because of this issue, the GNU IceCat browser can't advise users to install and use them, in general. Below is the list of addons that we have checked to be Free.

We have not checked all addons present on the Mozilla web site. If you have looked at any other addon and found that it is explicitly released under a free software license, please contact us at bug-gnuzilla@gnu.org, specifying the addon license and the URL where it can be downloaded (better if providing a patch against the current version). Then we will update this page.

We do not want to list add-ons that are only helpers for "Software as a Service." That means the add-on sends your data to someone else's server, which does a computation on your data and sends you back the results. If you see an add-on in this list which appears to be just a front-end for Software as a Service, please report it to bug-gnuzilla@gnu.org

If your favorite addon does not specify any license, please consider contacting the addon author about this issue. Please let us know if you do this.

Full description

"addons.mozilla.org, commonly known as "AMO", is Mozilla's official site for add-ons to Mozilla software, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Add-ons let you add new features and change the way your browser or application works. Take a look around and explore the thousands of ways to customize the way you do things online." - About AMO

We reuse their repository by downloading only free add-ons that can bee used for entierly free variants of IceCat, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey.

This page list IceCat add-ons which constitute the bulk of the repo. This repo should not to be confused with IceCat plugins. See also FSD:3rd-party data for IceCat add-ons. See Discussion for how and what to help with in this collection. GNU IceCat is the official add-on repository and consist only of Approved entries.

Note: an add-on may occassionally change status from approved to unapproved. This article contains both proposed (unapproved) and approved add-ons; but in all cases you can always find the full list of both approved and proposed/unapproved here. The text "Review note" and "Bugzilla reference" (when found), are commented to some add-ons.

This article is used to help organize our work of reviewing and properly identifying the licensing info on thousands of Mozilla add-ons. This work is necessary due to erroneous licensing information sometimes found at AMO. In fact, Mozilla themselves didn't even put license notices in the source files of https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot

Free AMOs work with free variants of Firefox such as Abrowser, or with free variants of Firefox ESR such as GNU IceCat 38 by using the icecat package in Trisquel 7. These free browser extensions are usually available within 2 weeks of the release date of their Mozilla counterparts. Rubén Rodríguez is the maintainer for IceCat, and also is the project leader of Trisquel. Thus these extensions will continue to be tested with these browsers.


Here are all the AMOs and extensions that you will find here in this superset:



Many add-ons are present in all repositories so its hard to say exactly how many add-ons that have been reviewed. There are many add-ons exclusive to this listing (not found in any of the above repositories). This page supersedes the listings above and is the definitive source for free browser extensions for the following reasons:

  • Many add-ons are exclusively found here
  • Ignore the Newest AMO's as it would require a full time job to keep track of all the add-ons; AMO contains over 17 000 add-ons.
  • exclude AMOs versions which are incompatible with IceCat 38.8.0 (based on Firefox ESR 38.8.0),
  • exclude AMOs which are buggy, superseded, have a bad rating, or not significantly popular
  • exclude add-ons for proprietary software or formats (Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant, and software with Flash, MP3, MP4, etc in the software name)
  • exclude Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS)
  • exclude AMOs which lack support for GNU/Linux (general Free Software Directory requirement)
  • highlight secure version over non-secure version (SSL versions of OpenSearch over non-SSL versions)
  • highlight international version over national version (eg meteorology add-ons)
  • exclude known mass surveillance services (commercial cloud/social media).

Add-ons that were listed on addons.mozilla.org without any license were manually downloaded and reviewed. I added them only if the files distributed them as free software.



Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the page “GNU Free Documentation License”.

The copyright and license notices on this page only apply to the text on this page. Any software or copyright-licenses or other similar notices described in this text has its own copyright notice and license, which can usually be found in the distribution or license text itself.