Comodo IceDragon

» see comodo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Comodo IceDragon arrived on 29 June 2012 as version 13.0, announced on Comodo's own user forum at a point when it did not yet have a page on comodo.com. The pitch was Firefox with a security vendor's habits layered over it. Comodo Secure DNS replaced your resolver, SiteInspector scanned links before you followed them, and an option existed to run the entire browser inside Comodo's sandbox.

For seven years it kept pace with Mozilla, usually a step behind. Firefox 13 in the summer of 2012, then version after version, all the way to a build on the Firefox 65 codebase in 2019. Windows only, free, no revenue attached to it anywhere. It was the second of Comodo's two browsers, the Gecko one, sitting next to the Chromium-based Comodo Dragon that got most of the company's attention.

The last release went up on 19 June 2019. Version 65.0.2.15, with a changelog of exactly three lines: updated to the Firefox 65 codebase, fixed an issue with plug-ins not loading, fixed an issue with WhatsUp Web. Then nothing, for years, while the marketing pages carried on describing a current product.

Comodo is one of the very few security companies used worldwide with a Turkish surname on the founding line, Melih Abdulhayoğlu, which is the kind of detail an engineer in Ankara notices and then has nothing much to do with. By 2012 the desktop here had already gone to Chrome, and a free hardened Firefox from a certificate authority was not going to pull it back. The name registered. The browser did not.

~ the case file ~

~ what comodo bolted on ~

The additions were all of one type: move a trust decision from your machine to Comodo's infrastructure. DNS queries went to Comodo's servers rather than your ISP's, which in a country where the ISP-level block list was a live political question was a real feature and not only a marketing one. Link scanning ran against Comodo's SiteInspector reputation data. The virtual container mode ran the browser in an isolated environment so a bad page could not reach the rest of the system.

None of that was unreasonable for 2012. It also made the browser only as good as one vendor's willingness to keep maintaining a Firefox fork, which turned out to be the load-bearing assumption.

~ the year nobody was told ~

Users worked it out on their own. A forum post from 12 August 2020 reads: AlternativeTo lists IceDragon as discontinued, over a year and nothing at all, if it is dead they should say so. Comodo never said so. A moderator finally confirmed the whole shape of it in October 2025, writing that there had been no official retirement announcement and that the IceDragon board was simply moved into Discontinued Products somewhere between December 2021 and January 2022.

The product page went with it. The last live capture, on 1 February 2022, was still titled "Ice Dragon 2022 | Download Comodo IceDragon Internet Browser", marketed as current more than two and a half years after the final build. By 4 April 2022 that address was returning a 301 to comodo.com, and it has returned one on every capture since.

~ the other dragon ~

Comodo Dragon, the Chromium sibling, outlived IceDragon by nearly six years and got the ending IceDragon never received. On 6 April 2026 a moderator posted that Dragon had been discontinued, that the decision was confirmed by Melih himself, and that users should switch to another browser. In the same thread someone noted in passing that IceDragon had been dead for almost seven years by then.

Two zombie marketing pages still pitch IceDragon at browser.comodo.com, with several dozen mentions apiece. Every link on them is a broken template variable that was never filled in, pointing at a path that begins site_urlhome. The installer does still download, 81 megabytes of it, carrying a Last-Modified header of 19 June 2019.

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