Welcome a new Fennec F-Droid

I have just submitted a Fennec update to 81.1.1. Should be available soon™. This version brings a lot of changes, like a new UI and modular codebase. The bad news:

  • Mozilla now tracks you even more actively using proprietary 3rd party services. I removed all tracking I found. (Firebase, Adjust and Leanplum libraries were replaced with stubs, so some analyzers can erroneously report their presence in the APK.)
  • The new UI may break your habits and disappoint you. (IMHO it’s not that bad as one can conclude from reading r/Firefox.)
  • Android 5.0 or later is now required. Mozilla decided so.
  • x86 devices are not supported anymore. I stumbled upon linkage errors and gave up. Help is welcome.

The good news is that Fennec F-Droid is alive and continues to be truly free software.

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This includes x86_64?

I suppose we won’t rename it to Fenix F-Droid? I guess not many people know where the current name comes from anyway :).

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:rocket: thanks for this @relan.

Mozilla pushed out Fenix faster then I thought they would.
Do any of you know how Tor Project is or plans on handling this?

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You really sholud not transform this browser to fenix. It was two seperated browsers as Fennec and Fenix. Don’t mix the names each other.
Fennec users will lose their open tabs if they update the browser to fenix version and it has mess ui. Fenix have to be an other app

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@archi_dagac

You really sholud not transform this browser to fenix.

Fennec target was removed from Firefox in version 71.
And ESR68 branch received its final update last month.

Your web browser is not something you want to run without security updates.

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This includes x86_64?

Didn’t try. I leave this to someone who’s interested.

I suppose we won’t rename it to Fenix F-Droid?

Fenix is just a codename, IMO it makes more sense to continue calling it Fennec.

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Good afternoon: It’s great news to know that a great browser like Fennec is still alive. Since it is a great browser What I hope, that they do not take me wrong with what I am going to say. But I hope it’s not like Fenix. Since for me this version of Mozilla is in many cases like Chrome. Since, for example, it does not allow adding add-ons from the add-on website, you have to use the browser part for it. It has google trackers and many others as well as loggers. Like a bunch of telemetry and things pulled from Chrome. And other things that can continue to be listed. For me there Mozilla has made a mistake with this new browser and left its origins. And it would be a shame if the same thing happens to a great browser like Fennec. Since I have to admit that many people to whom I have taught Fennec, and they did not know him. They have set it as the default browser and are in love with this browser. For speed, operation, clear configuration, configuration option after about: config, it accepts an endless number of add-ons, etc … And they tried Fenix ​​and it was install, try and uninstall. And they don’t want the same to happen with Fennec. What if I don’t know if in this new version of Fennec instead of search engines like wikipedia, twitter for example. You can source other search engines like qwant, searx, metager.Since bringing search engines from wikipedia I do not see it useful when, for example, using a search engine it already gives you results. A hug and a thousand thanks for all your effort and time

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Fennec was the codename of the old Firefox for Android though. I think I’d slightly prefer to rename this (eventually) to Fenix, but don’t have a strong opinion about it.

Let’s get it updated first.

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I vote for renaming it and using another app id to prevent some users from updating it by accident. Since most add-ons is not available on fenix, therer is not too much data need to be transfer.

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Thank you for you work! May I ask is about:config page still accessible in that build? So that it would be possible to set up an in-browser proxy or deactivate Internet search from the omnibox.

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How can I help? I have an x86 phone so I can test the end result, but I know absolutely nothing about Android. I need help helping you :slight_smile:

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May I ask is about:config page still accessible in that build?

Yes.

How can I help? I have an x86 phone so I can test the end result, but I know absolutely nothing about Android. I need help helping you

I’m afraid you need some development skills to help building Fennec for x86.

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Great work!

It’s sad that firefox is going in bad/weird directions with tracking and UI changes. But at least having it in F-Droid is very appreciated. The requirement on Android 5.0 is unfortunate but not surprising (and previous versions could barely run on the old 4.4 devices I’ve tried it on).

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Might explain why the program runs slow on the older devices. All that tracking requires a better processor :smirk:

Seriously is Mozilla dropping Android 4.4? Are they really trying to live up to their label as the “internet villain of 2019”?

I’ll need to completely replace Firefox soon, and maybe Tor will need to hard fork it also. Good job on this but I don’t need much of an incentive to ditch Mozilla these days.

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But there are no real alternatives… or are there?

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A testing build for arm64 can be found here: <Redacted as it’s available in the official repo now>

The app shares the appid with the official F-Droid Fennec build but is signed with a different key, so it won’t install as an update to any existing version and neither will the future official build install over this version.

Rename it to F-Droid Browser. It deserves that name as it is already a long time and F-Droid exclusive Firefox flavor.

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I don’t agree, I feel it should be clear that this is Firefox not some random strange browser.

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Is the default DNS still Cloudflare? Can the DNS be randomized to use a few DNS resolvers at random from an array (a list similar to this maybe)?

We somehow have two different icons for this:

image

I’m confused :D.

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