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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

What's the status of the browser? Before it was stuck with ancient Gecko, because IPC embedlite project basically died. What are they doing now about it? I wish they'd take something like Servo and browser.html for these purposes.

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During the last community meeting there was talk that the browser engine is getting updated, but no more details than that:

http://merproject.org/meetings/mer-meeting/2018/mer-meeting....

Interesting. I hope they'll figure something out with Gecko or Servo, instead of simply switching to Blink.

Latest Firefox Mobile LTS release still works on Jolla’s ancient Android version (through the Alien Dalvik compatibility layer). You can install it from F-Droid.

Wow, that's impressive. I wouldn't have guessed an app as complex as Firefox would work on Jolla's compatibility layer.

The Android compatibility layer is actually Alien Dalvik developed by Myriad. It is mostly used on set-top boxes for TVs. Jolla just licensed it for their phones. As far as I know, even on the latest Sailfish X, Alien Dalvik only supports the API level of Android 4.4 (2013).

It's really weird that supposedly open source Android runtime is so hard to actually run on proper Linux.

Not really. We can't run some Linux software on BSD either. (eg. Gnome, because it depends on systemd, which depends on Linux-specific features).

The latest non-LTS release works too.

Firefox is not available on fdroid anymore. There's a fork called Fennec that brings it into line with fdroid policy. There's also Icecat.

To get Firefox without being forced into a Google account use Yalp installer.

Firefox Klar, which is an official Mozilla project, is available on F-Droid. There's some added content blocking stuff but otherwise it's just Firefox.

Klar/Focus is a completely different thing from normal Firefox, it's a Webview wrapper with very limited feature set (no tabs, no sync, no bookmarks, no extensions, etc).

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