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?
I could be mistaken, but since it’s a Mozilla base code and F-Droid distribution chain, I’m not sure where Google can stick it’s thumb in the pie.
Mozilla relied on an Android NDK to build correctly, became no longer available right as a firefox vulnerability came out and the Fennec dev was away from home.