this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Fennec on f-droid has anti-features, it connects to mozilla services that can track users. Does it HAVE to do that? Should I use it if my trust in firefox is eroding? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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With recent concerns about Firefox and the mozilla corporation I am starting to wonder if I should take stock of alternatives. A common recommendation seems to be Fennec, but given what F-droid describes as anti-features, I wonder if I'm essentially replacing the problem like for like.

What do they mean? What services? Optional ones? Can it be used without connecting to any mozilla services at all?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Ever since Mull was abandoned, I've been using IronFox. It's a privacy and security strengthened fork of Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Even if Mozilla seems to have clarified the TOS for the better, I am already experimenting with Librewolf and Zen on Win11 and Fennec on Android. And I was about to ask the same question...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What services does it connect to?

Edit: after I posted I saw in the summary that you're not sure whatserviceds it uses either. I wonder if there is a way to get the specifics from f-droid.

You might check out ironfox to see if it also has the same issues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Looking at my firewall logs (RethinkDNS) Ironfox doesn't seem to try to connect to anything I don't want it to except safebrowsing. That's blocked anyway by the firewall, and is easily disabled in about:config. You may want to use safebrowsing, and Firefox connects to their own implementation of it before it hits Googles servers.

Info on safebrowsing and Firefox is here

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work