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?
Firefox 130 was released on the 3th of September, almost 2 months ago. This didn’t just happen in a short time frame.
Fennec being a version behind for over a month because the dev was absent wouldn’t normally be that big a deal if not for the vulnerability being discovered.