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?

  • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    I’ll just throw out Mull from DivestOS’s third-party f-droid repo as an up to date alternative. The newest versions are incompatible with the main repo but here is their explanation:

    Updated Mull to 131.0.0, has 14+1+25 security fixes from the previous 129.0.2 release. In order to resolve the compilation issue introduced in 130, Mull is now compiled using Mozilla’s prebuilt clang toolchain. This however is incompatible with the F-Droid.org inclusion criteria, so these updates (for now at least) will only be available via the DivestOS.org F-Droid repository. Please note, while this adds a prebuilt dependency, the result does still remain FOSS.

    • Handles@leminal.spaceOPEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Ah yes, the toolchain changes appear to be a stumbling stone for the Fennec devs as well. That kind of thing doesn’t exactly speed up new releases, I’m sure.

      What are your experiences with Mull? Is it generally compatible with Firefox plugins, and are there performance improvements as well as in security?