I’ve been following the Debian vs Mozilla case (aka Iceweasel/Firefox) pretty closely, especially as this happened during the JDLL (if you don’t read french, debian people put those posters on their booth which was just in front of the mozilla one, which triggered a blogging skirmish involving quite a lot of bird name calling). See this LWN article for a quick summary of the situation.
I had been thinking of leaving firefox entirely for a long time (I had already traded thunderbird for mutt last year), mainly due to its huge memory print (I like to navigate with more than 20 tabs at the same time), its slowliness and a growing dislike of the mozilla attitude, especially since the creation of the Mozilla Corporation.
As far as I know, there are only a few alternatives: epiphany, which I discarded because it’s running gecko, opera, which is very good but unfortunately not free (as in speech) and konqueror. I initially overlooked it because I’m not running KDE, and I was fearing that it would want 90% of the desktop environment to work, but it looked pretty happy with “only” kde-libs (which I already had for k3b, anyway) and some extra stuff.
I have to say it’s really good, and in fact much better than what I had thought, even when run on top of FVWM. Navigation/rendering is good and the UI responds without any noticeable delay, which is really a big relief from firefox. I have imported my bookmarks and spent 5 minutes reconfiguring the fonts, and there we go!
So far, there are only two things that I miss, though I may have simply overlooked them: forms staying filled when you press the back button, and tabs being saved from one session to the next one.
I plan to unmerge firefox in the next few days and have, at last, a mozilla-clean machine, which would be a nice gift for its second birthday!