Welcome to the droidymcdroidface-iest, Lemmyest (Lemmiest), test, bestest, phoniest, pluckiest, snarkiest, and spiciest Android community on Lemmy (Do not respond)! Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
We are Android girls*,
In our Lemmy.world.
The back is plastic,
It's fantastic.
*Well, not just girls: people of all gender identities are welcomed here.
Our Partner Communities:
LibreWolf is a great privacy oriented Browser for desktop. But there is no version for android or IOS . There are some like mull but they have their own problems. Mobile phones stay with us most of the day. So we need extra privacy for it.
Mull is a good choice for android at the moment
Oh, cool. I hadn't heard of this one before. I use Fennec. I wonder what the main differences are. I noticed Mull mentions fennec in their F-droid page:
It [Mull] is compiled from source and proprietary blobs are removed using scripts by Relan from [https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild here].
It seems like Mull is more privacy focused?
I just swapped to mull today. Fennec is only on fdroid or build it yourself. Fdroid updates take a week for official repo. Mull can get faster updates through DivestOS repo. Firefox just had a huge 0day and fennec is currently vulnerable.
Ahh, cool! Good to know. I just checked that 0day, and they're both JS exploits (which I imagine most probably are), so NoScript will probably protect me unless some of my trusted domains get compromised. It's not ideal, but it's within my comfort tolerance.
android already has fennec and mull though
Soo, what "own problems" does mull have? I mean, pretty much fennec with some tor patches
This always gets downvoted, because it's a painful truth, but Chromium on Android is significantly more secure than Firefox.
There is a reason why the default included browser on GrapheneOS, Vanadium, is a Chromium fork.
So I'm sorry, until Firefox on Android catches up to Chromium, another Firefox fork isn't going to make the impact on the ecosystem that you think it is.
I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't use Firefox forks on Android, I'm saying do so being aware of their limitations relative to Chromium forks, such as Cromite, or Mulch, the latter being the same dev as Mull. That same dev also has a lengthy write-up going over the technical details of why Chromium is more secure than Firefox on Android.
This has nothing to do with desktop browser engines, this is specifically and exclusively in regards to Android browsers
It's because you are making extreme claims without any sources.
Pretty sure I told you where you could find more information, as well as pointing out that the default browser on Graphene is a hardened Chromium browser, not Firefox Gecko.
But okay, here, I can even do that little bit of searching for you:
what divestOS is actually saying:
While DivestOS includes a Gecko based browser for privacy reasons, Chromium based browsers have many security advantages. It is up to the user to choose their preference.
it really sucks tho, because most chromium forks still force you to use a google account in order to sync, and thats if they don't strip google entirely. there's brave, but I haven't had the best of experiences with that browser.
I can still self host something like floccus to "sync" bookmarks, and use kde connect to send browser tabs from one device to another, but I still wish it was as convenient as firefox; which iirc, let's you self host their sync service
True. For now I got a combo of Firefox and Firefox focus. Set focus as default browser, and if you do need cookies, copy the link.
The problem is that they both have telemetry.
Fennec, maybe?
Just to mention, Fennec's F-droid page does list the following as an anti-feature:
This app tracks and reports your activity
Connects to various Mozilla services that can track users.
It does say that telemetry has been removed, but that it still connects to services (like Firefox Sync, for example) which could still potentially be used to track you.
That's not a dealbreaker for me personally, but if it bothers anyone else, it seems like Mull might be the more privacy conscious choice, at the cost of some convenience features.
You can disable FF Sync from about:config
I recommend a combo of Mull and Mulch or Cromite instead. Configure one of them to delete cookies and history on exit. Use URLCheck as your default browser. Then you can see the actual link when you click on one, you can remove tracking parameters, and then choose which browser to open it in.
Surprisingly, I thought about the same thing a few days ago ... but we have mull browser
It's not LibreWolf, but how about IceRaven?
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
Has been my goto FireFox fork for Android for years.
It still has telemetry. Devs also mentioned it in the github repo
ok but like... telemetry is not automatically bad. a vast majority of users never report bugs in software, and are trained to just click through popups. this means the bugs don't get fixed, and the crash reports don't get sent.
scrutinizing what actually gets sent from your browser is how you keep yourself safe, blocking all telemetry is how you get unpatched security holes.
My thing against Firefox/Librewolf is lack of security...unless it's improved?
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.