@nalexander, thank you very much for saving Fennec’s freedom!
This is great, thanks! It would be nice to have an official Firefox in F-Droid again. Do you think that would be possible using --without-google-play-services?
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I’m confident that Mozilla Corporation doesn’t want to support an officially branded Firefox for Android that doesn’t have the full complement of Web Platform features. (In this case, GCM is required for Web Push, which is a big part of the Progressive Web Apps strategy on mobile.)
So while it’s technically possible, it’s not something that Mozilla is likely to commit resources to. I am interested in doing small things to ensure that downstream projects (including, but not limited to, F-Droid) can build a free-as-in-freedom Firefox for Android without fragile build system hacks for the foreseeable future.
That means that F-Droid will need to continue branding Firefox for Android, just like it does now.
makes sense. I’ve been lobbying Google through all the channels I have
to ask them to open source the GMS/Play Services libraries. That’s the
only thing that’s not free software for many important apps, like
Firefox. MicroG has done some work towards making free replacements,
hopefully that can also be used to pressure Google. Its not like the
business logic is in those small GMS jars.
They do seem to be moving more on open sourcing the Firebase libraries.
Is Firebase Push a possibility for Firefox?
Yes, we (Mozilla Corporation) did too. I can’t link to the ticket since it’s MoCo-confidential, but there was nothing really interesting – our council reached out and I don’t think we got anywhere.
I concur, although the division of responsibility between the client code and the privileged on-device service code is not clear to me. I think the sticking point is the Chromecast code, which – as far as I know – does the interesting bits of the protocol on the device, and potentially even in the consuming App’s process space. This is hearsay/speculation, though.
Technically, yes. If we (I!) had built our Web Push integration perhaps 12-18 months later, we would have undoubtedly used FCM instead of GCM. As it stands, I think there’s a race between Google deprecating GCM entirely and Firefox for Android modernizing its Web Push implementation. It’s probably not a lot of work but there’s nobody working on it right now (and nothing scheduled that I know of). (Tongue only somewhat in cheek: patches wanted!)
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Here’s some good news: VLC has implemented fully open source Chromecast support:
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Fennec 60.0 is available on F-Droid now! I’d like to thank everyone who put so much efforts into this release!
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Is it me or is version 60.0 available for certain devices? I’ve updated the repos on my F-Droid app and I couldn’t see any update for Fennec.
I’ve also tried installing it using the APK from the website: Fennec F-Droid | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and I received this message from adb install:
adb: failed to install org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid_600010.apk: Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_NO_MATCHING_ABIS: Failed to extract native libraries, res=-113]
This could be two things. It’s most likely a legit ABI issue – you’re installing an APK with ARM libraries on an x86 device (or, less likely, vice versa). It could also be an issue that Firefox for Android is seeing with recent devices (particularly the Samsung Galaxy S8) – see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450793 and related tickets.
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So is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450793 the reason why F-droid shows no updates available for Fennec on my device? I have a Samsung S5 device (codenamed klte, model SM-G900F), it’s processor is based on the ARM instruction set as far as I’ve investigated so far.
No. Given that you’re using an S5 (a very common ARM device) I think the issue is probably the F-Droid APKs are giving you x86 native libraries, which isn’t what you want. This could be a version number issue – if F-Droid isn’t behaving like the Play Store and is offering the linearly highest version number, rather than the highest version number appropriate for your device, you will get this issue. But I don’t know enough about F-Droid to say what’s really happening.
No, the reason is that, while available, the “recommended version” didn’t get bumped. This should happen with the next index update. In the meantime, you can install it manually from the “versions” fold of the app info screen.
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You were right, thanks!
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I have the same device and it downloaded and installed on my device just fine.
Firefox advertises itself as Free And Open Source but yet we have forks like icecat; now fennec, why? Why do we have the need for fennec, cant the firefox team support icecat? Or at least provide a fully free software browser and not lies?
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I heard that tmobile supports firefox from latest big release and worried to…
There are some hard technical issues behind why Firefox includes the proprietary Google libraries. There is no free software way to replace something like Google/Firebase Cloud Messaging, for example.
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Blockquote
Firefox advertises itself as Free And Open Source but yet we have forks like icecat; now fennec, why? Why do we have the need for fennec, cant the firefox team support icecat? Or at least provide a fully free software browser and not lies?
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
Also, I am interested that too.
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Thanks for the link.
Isn’t DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository basically a Ff stripped out of everything suspicious?
DuckDuckGo Browser for Android merely wraps the system WebView (Chromium/Chrome).
It is not a standalone browser nor a fork of Gecko/Firefox/Fenix.
I also personally wouldn’t trust DuckDuckGo Browser after these shenanigans: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/issues/527
Please create another thread if you want to discuss this.
Or see this other related thread: Favourite browsers to use
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Aside, aren’t threads supposed to lock after 60 days?
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