Technology

It's just very unfortunate timing. Google removed some library Firefox depended on in NDK and it meant developers need to make significant changes to their packaging system. At the same time critical vulnerably was discovered in Firefox. On top of that, everything happened when main developer of Fennec was away from home and short on time. But from what I've seen on Fennec gitlab most of the work is done so you should expect update soon.

A bit of backstory on how we got here - in June 2024 Mozilla chose to (a) integrate the source tree of Firefox Mobile into their huge monorepo ("gecko-dev"), and (b) move the source off of Github onto their own git servers ("Mozilla Central"). You can read about it in the now-archived old repo:

• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android
• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcoming-migration-to-mozilla-central

This was then compounded by a core Android build kit ("NDK") choosing to remove parts of the toolchain which is/was used to build Firefox releases (ergo, forcing another change to build process):

• https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/2010

Together these have caused a bit of a kerfuffle in getting new releases compiled and released via the official F-Droid methodology. See the other comment about the Mull version in their private repo, they're having to use a Mozilla pre-built clang (a compiler toolchain) now to make it work for the time being.

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.

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.

If you want an up-to-date and lightweight Firefox fork, try Waterfox that's what I'm using right now

Fdroid just posted https://floss.social/@fdroidorg/113384089915217604

more tolerable version

It doesn't even get updates. What are you on about? 😂

Same, I just switched to mull. Use FFupdater

For those who want to install standard FF via Obtainium use this:

https://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/fenix/releases/

Then add intermediate links (EDIT: this will only fetch releases like 130.0 or 130.1, etc. so feel free to edit regex if you want to match other versions like 130.0.1)

[0-9]+\.[0-9]+/$

android/$

fenix-[0-9]+\.[0-9]+-android-arm64-v8a/$

EDIT: based on https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium/issues/1625#issuecomment-2120736614

Is there a way to transfer my browser profile on Android between Fennec and Firefox?

I got the same warning for Mull. Is the patching so extensive? I always thought they have a patchset for some of the shortcomings and just apply that onto the newest Firefox version... Or do they do a full code review on all of the changes?

I have Mull installed 129.0.2 https://f-droid.org/repo/us.spotco.fennec_dos_21290220.apk

Should I uninstall?

Is there any way to export bookmarks from mull, so that I can uninstall it?