this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Found this notification this morning on my pixel 6.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
  • Fennec - Firefox build with some proprietary stiff removed; repo
  • IronFox - Firefox fork (forked from Mull) with a bunch of hardening changes (notably resistFingerprinting enabled); repo

IronFox is more ambitious, which means higher maintenance load and more likely to fall behind. Fennec is much simpler, so less likely to fall behind, but also doesn't change much from Firefox.

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

I would love to see a real comparison.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

I like fennec because the name is cute.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I've not heard of ironfox before this thread! Could you possibly link it? Doesn't seem like it's on FDroid or IzzyOnDroid

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You have to add IronFox's repo in F-Droid before you can install it from there. This is their Github link.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

In addition to what others have said, it can be downloaded from the Accrescent app store:

https://accrescent.app/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Never heard of that, what's the benefit over F-Droid?

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

GrapheneOS posted this on Mastodon about a month & a half back:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113900949999725460

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The main difference is of philosophy of trust. With F-droid you trust F-droid to build the binary from the developers' source code. With Accrescent, you trust the developers to build the binary from the source code.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

With F-droid you trust F-droid to build the binary from the developers' source code

Not when using a self-hosted F-Droid Repo - which is the case for Ironfox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I wish more projects hosted their own F-droid repo and kept it up to date. FUTO has one for their stuff (Grayjay, FUTO Keyboard, etc), but it's frequently outdated, whereas Bitwarden and a few others I use do a good job.

Maybe Accrescent is what I'm looking for. I just want a store that:

  • automatically updates when devs push a release
  • checks signatures
  • has a good selection of FOSS apps

I basically want fdroid, but faster updates.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah that's like any 3rd party repository

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So Accrescent is more like the classic play store or Obtainium?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

In the play store you're trusting Google and the developer.

I'm not sure how obtainium works. But if you download binaries from GitHub, you're trusting the developer to accurately build their source code into the binary without adding anything. You're also trusting GitHub implicitly -- way back when, source forge was sometimes adding malware to downloads iirc.

F-droid is kind of cool in that they are saying, "we will ensure for you that the code you execute is the same as the open source code you can read". But this added level of insurance comes with downsides -- like sometimes it's harder for the developer to make their code build properly, or maybe updates take longer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And here I'm trusting Accrescent to actually deliver me an executable that has not been tampered with

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yes you are trusting them, and the developer. Just like you are trusting F-droid if you download from them. You also have to trust that the compiler program doesn't do anything fishy. It's trust all the way down.

The good news is that lots of people are working on making the systems trustworthy, and you as a consumer can learn to distinguish between what can be trusted for your usecase and what can't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

IronFox is on F-Droid. That where I got it from at least

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)