If, like me, you’ve relied on Fennec as a more tolerable version of Firefox for Android, you may have gotten some bad news in the latest F-droid update cycle.
Fennec has fallen so far behind on updates that serious security patches implemented by Mozilla in Firefox haven’t been applied to the fork, and Fennec is therefore still breachable.
The developer responded two weeks ago that they were “short on time”, and there still isn’t a new, secure version available. This appears to be due to that recurring weak link in open source development: small teams, confronted by real life demands like time and money?
What do you find not tolerable in standard Firefox and what did this browser do that made it better?
I know firefox is rather memory heavy, but despite that it’s still my go-to browser, both for desktop and mobile.
Upstream Firefox doesn’t comply with FDroid’s rules (thanks to the ‘proprietary bits and telemetry’ Handles mentioned), so is only available from the Play Store or as a loose APK that won’t auto-update.
This reads like “they only sell hamburgers at the grocery store, and they don’t sell veggie burgers at the hippie food store because they aren’t vegan”
it’s also available from Mozilla’s repos and can be updated using Obtainium https://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/fenix/releases/
Cool.
But I’m not adding another method of updating apps just for the browser. F-Droid is where my non-play store apps live and update from, and I’d like to keep it that way.
I use Obtainium (available in F-Droid) alongside F-Droid since both have auto-updates
this is still tolerable to the old days of updating manually
biggest upside is I can update Tubular/Newpipe faster via Obtainium while F-Droids build system takes days
I think this is beside the point here, but as it says in the F-droid description, their build “has proprietary bits and telemetry removed”.