Mull has been discontinued, add Fennec F-Droid support?

[SevastianGit]

Mull has been unfortunately discontinued with the discontinuation of DivestOS and it's apps.

From how much I know, Mull is just a fork of Fennec F-Droid (a browser based on Firefox with all proprietary bits and telemetry removed, maintained by Mozilla themselves) with just extra themeing and a modified arkenfox user.js applied.

Now that Mull's gone, Fennec is quite probably the next best option for an (advanced) user to use, since you can manually modify it's about:config or if you have root access available you can use any user.js of your choice (arkenfox, Betterfox, Modified arkenfox user.js used by Mull [I took the one from github and replaced "pref" with "user_pref" to not have syntax errors, rename to user.js to use]) to put into /data/user/0/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/files/[random profile name here].default.

I really hope someone takes on the Mull project, as applying a hardened user.js is impossible/impractical for non-root users (and making a fork of Fennec F-Droid that just preapplies a certain modified user.js doesn't sound that hard), but as it currently stands, it seems to be the best maintained option, and it'd be awesome if the current script used to apply the AMOLED theme to Mull could also be remade for Fennec.

[ArtikusHG]

i was literally just yesterday trying to fix the unthemed tabs tray and now there's this god damn :/

a couple thoughts:

• dont know if i can keep maintaining this; firefox made theming parts of the app really difficult and im still trying to figure this out, i dont have time to keep up with that unfortunately
• if nobody picks up mull, i will probably stop using firefox mobile altogether
• that being said i can change the apk source to fennec, however we need to see what will happen to mull first.

[ArtikusHG]

if the user js file is contained within the apk and does not affect anything at bulid time, theoretically it can be modified just as we modify xml values to create the theme??? just a though, though the scope of the project will be much wider and i probably wont take this on myself

[ArtikusHG]

another alternative would be to patch multiple apks at once, for different builds of firefox, and publish them all at the same time. problem is, again, i dont have time to maintain this. i can give someone access to the repo if anyone's willing to

[ArtikusHG]

some people are already forking mull so its fine

[SevastianGit]

• that being said i can change the apk source to fennec, however we need to see what will happen to mull first.

Well, the the main repo got archived dec 23rd, so besides forks I doubt the main Mull project is getting anything from the main devs if one of them doesn't suddenly decide to branch out to develop it separately from the DivestOS project (unlikely?)

if the user js file is contained within the apk and does not affect anything at bulid time, theoretically it can be modified just as we modify xml values to create the theme???

I did some digging into the APK myself and haven't found anything, maybe I missed something or maybe you'll only find it by decoding classes.dex, which seems a bit messy atp but idk?

some people are already forking mull so its fine

Really? I mean there can be random forks, I'm curious about any projects of the same spirit that are planned ro be maintained haha

P.S.: Researching some of these things made me realize how "undercooked" Firefox Mobile is compared to it's PC equivalent (mainly in terms of privacy and security features I believe - RFP has no letterboxing, no site isolation/Fission nor Android's isolatedProcess applied, etc.; Discussion on PrivacyGuides: [1], [2]), but hey, it's a work in progress (Bugzilla issues: [3] [4])

P.S.2.: I've been hyperfixating on anti-fingerprint related topics and namely this fingerprinting test site/project named CreepJS (Focus on the "FP ID" on top).
And so well, I've tested it on Mull and see that it can accurately match the exact same fingerprint of it no matter what settings I tried to tweak, which is unfortunate (I could make it differ by like toggling resistFingerprinting in about:config n such but it's like switching between two different fingerprints).

And then I also had a very interesting outlier with Cromite (With viewport, timezone and such randomization applied, at least semi-best settings for privacy enabled) with that it on the other hand generated a new "FP ID" on top with each page refresh! But since there seems to be an ongoing issue with big parts of the test showing "API access denied" on Cromite for me, I don't go out of my way to conclude that Cromite is "the best anti-fingerprinting browser for Android" and 'disqualify' these results for now.

I even tested it on Tor browser on mobile (Mainly on Safer, Safest blocks javascript) which yielded different kinds of results - it's not super black-and-white when it comes to anti-fingerprinting things, but I kind of draw two conclusions from my experiments:

1. JavaScript is a privacy nightmare, since well, you know, none of this deep fingerprinting would be possible without it.
2. The lackluster implementation of Firefox desktop's resistFingerprinting (No letterboxing/viewport protection; always sending the system language [randomization issues?] n such) seem to be showing in terms of making the browser (in some capacity even on Tor browser it seems?)
   2.1. A kind of funny note is that when I imported Mull's user.js into Fennec, CreepJS gave me an exact same fingerprint as it gave me on Mull

Also, just as I added that last link/citation I realized that the dev says that they had to toggle things like ETP strict by tweaking defaults in the code itself (at least at that point back in 2022? I wonder how things are today, but this adds more to the whole FF Mobile being "undercooked" thing if it's still the case today.), so I'm thinking that maybe me putting Mull's user.js into my Fennec install might not give me an identical hardening result.

Which is another thing (besides me not finding it in usual assets) to why your idea of widening the scope of the project to include rebuilds of APKs with user.js replaced might not work out/be the most effective, but focusing on OLED things is probably the more logical move (If you still would want to maintain/work on anything related to this)

^Nvm, scratch everything I said here, ETP stands for Enchanced Tracking Protection and I believe they were just talking about changing the default setting to Strict which seems semi-irrelevant for your idea and the effectiveness of using user.js for preferences in the first place (having to change ETP to Strict manually in settings is no big deal anyway.)

Sorry for taking the topic of this issue into a big discussion of browser privacy, but hey since we're looking for knowledge and alternatives I think that it's an interesting and beneficial discussion for everyone;)

[SevastianGit]

I also wanted to add on to my discussion above that I'm also a big fan of Gecko-based browsers strongly cuz of their support of Firefox PC extensions (uBlock Origin and others on mobile are great, Cromite's adblock is good but not as great)

Edit: With extra curiosity to this side of things, I found out that Cromite could be getting extensions support soon, which could be quite huge imo, although if it'd be MV3 only (no Brave's MV2 patch or sth like that) it'd be significantly handicapped compared to Firefox's extension support, but still a huge improvement nonetheless.

[SevastianGit]

@ArtikusHG https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
Seems like a continuation project of Mull is upon us (I'd assume you were referring to this one), we shall see where this one goes, and I suppose you could simply change the APK source if this new project proves to be good and trustworthy

[ArtikusHG]

yup will do that once they have the first working builds

[ninosandzak]

Hi, Ironfox has released version, when do you think you could make an OLED version?