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Comment by Helmut10001 | Hacker News Reader

I use Fennec, and it allows adding any Desktop extension (idontcareaboutcookies, privacyredirect etc.).

Is there a version of Fennec with up to date HTML rendering engine? Where to get it?

AFAIK fennec is the code name for mobile firefox when mozilla had the very good android app that supported extensions, about:config and sane tab/bookmark management, and fenix is when mozilla ended fennec and replaced it with the much worse and clunky android app around 2020 that's still the only official one today, right?

You are right, according to this [1] Fennec is discontinued in favor of Fenix! I only use it for very simple stuff (HN, selfhosted apps etc.), so I did not notice. Yet, looking at the F-Droid store [2], Fennec indeed is available in a recent version (109.2.0) and it is being bumped by Mozilla [3].

    [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ih9vmb/firefox_for_android_fenix_79_release_fennec_is/
    [2]: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
    [3]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/commit/0861f91fd39e56a13a7664e588fcf53860e0d7ba

Confusingly, Fennec F-Droid is Fenix.

In the description on the F-Droid page it says "Fennec F-Droid is based on the latest Firefox release (codenamed Fenix).".

Thanks for the clarification! This is what I suspected, too. What matters to me is that it works with custom extension lists. I am not sure I understood what was special about the original "2020 Fennec".

There's also a note from someone on Reddit [1]:

> Fennec is also F-Droid's firefox version. It differs from official ones by having proprietary bits and all telemetry removed as well as unlocked about:config at the moment.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nff8sv/comment/gyl...

Are you using a recent version of F-Droid fennec (which may be fenix instead), and if so does this one support arbitrary plugins? Did F-droid manage to modify it for that?

What do you mean with Plugins? It works with custom extension lists (e.g. I have idontcareaboutcookies and privacy redirect installed).

In the same way as Beta and Nightly does, yes. Though I don't know which (or Stable) Fennec tracks.

Only if you register with AMO.

It seems like Iceraven doesn't have this restriction, and works like Firefox on Android originally used to?

Iceraven still has a list of allowed extensions, but they added several hundred extensions to the default list rather than Mozilla's dozen or so.

(It also supports custom lists like Fennec and FF Nightly.)

> Iceraven still has a list of allowed extensions

where is that list?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/1620123...

(It's linked to from Iceravens readme: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser )

Thanks! Did not know about the Iceraven project [1], which looks like a good replacement for Fenix.

[1]: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

Yes, you are correct (forgot about that!). I had to create my own collection of accepted extensions [1] and reference this in Fennec.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/1693474...

What's amo?

addons.mozilla.org

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