Bromite: Raise awareness for possibel slow updates

[rusty-snake]

See bromite/bromite#2163.
Summary: The development power of the bromite developers isn't enough to always have fast updates.

I don't know any good alternatives (except for Vanadium in GrapheneOS, which misses privacy features like canvas randomization) so bromite should still be recommended but in my opinion why should add a warning/info about this.

[matchboxbananasynergy]

I think Bromite has been behind in updates multiple times now, which is less than ideal. I think it's about time we de-listed it, and we can then consider alternatives.

[d4rklynk]

Doesn't mean mulch is bad though. It's good, it is just not meant for anti-fingerprinting.

[Mohamad20ZX]

Mulch is not a standalone browser. It's the Webview used for DivestOS. Mull is DivestOS's browser, which you can see a discussion on here: https://github.com/orgs/privacyguides/discussions/59

Ok but brave is still better then nothing

[rusty-snake]

If Brave [would be] available on F-Droid (own repo / IzzyOnDroid is enough; and actually better maybe I should request this) it would be a good consideration.

Official F-Droid repo: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/154
(possible) Brave repo: brave/brave-browser#7027
IzzyOnDroid: https://gitlab.com/IzzyOnDroid/repo/-/issues/278

Looks like brave will not be available on F-Droid until somebody start working on it. So you have download it from PlayStore (AuroraStore) or GitHub (which misses auto update).

[SkewedZeppelin]

@rusty-snake
Brave will never land in F-Droid official, it was brought up in the F-Droid Matrix a few months back.

While Bromite removes the blobs included in Chromium, no one has managed to remove the blobs used to actually compile Chromium afaict and that was a blocker for F-Droid inclusion. And while Chromium can mostly easily be compiled reproducibly, an F-Droid built variant wouldn't match official if it was strictly libre.

There have actually been two distinct attempts at compiling Chromium in fdroidserver, but both appeared to be completely unmanageable.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/2854
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/3351

Another issue is compile time, Fennec F-Droid and Mull each take around 10 hours to compile on F-Droid's build server.
Fenix takes an hour to compile locally for me and Chromium around 5 hours. If it could be compiled it'd tie up the build server for days, especially with the pace of Updates.

In the meantime you can use FFUpdater to get Brave and update notifications.

[csagan5]

While Bromite removes the blobs included in Chromium, no one has managed to remove the blobs used to actually compile Chromium afaict and that was a blocker for F-Droid inclusion. And while Chromium can mostly easily be compiled reproducibly, an F-Droid built variant wouldn't match official if it was strictly libre.

There have actually been two distinct attempts at compiling Chromium in fdroidserver, but both appeared to be completely unmanageable.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/2854
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/3351

It is a good summary, but let me add what I have stated before elsewhere: the biggest issue is to get Chromium to easily build using the F-Droid toolsuite; I had made some patches years ago to help speed up the process, in particular for the plenty dependencies that Chromium has. Once Chromium can be easily built there then one has to start iterating to remove everything which is not FOSS; this is a tricky process. In my opinion the difficulty of doing&iterating builds is the first blocker; the F-Droid build system is simply not designed for such huge projects with so many dependencies.

[Mohamad20ZX]

Just use brave and you can have anti fingerprinting ad blocking and encrypted sync

[d4rklynk]

Merged in #1519