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?
Yep, it’s this. Annoying change, but from what I was reading, perfectly solvable with a little time. Unfortunately the dev was moving house, so they fell a version behind at the worst possible moment, but they’re aware of the issue. I’m not too concerned.
Had it not been for FDroid’s warning, I wouldn’t have even realized Fennec was a version behind (now 2). Normally it’s not that big a deal.