I’m reopening a subject that has been the subject of much (too much?) ink, but I notice that the browser & webview have not been updated for almost 9 months, after another long period of several months without an update before this latest patch.
It’s true that the developer of bromite has closed the curtain, but given that it’s open source software, and not part of this foundation, I don’t see the causal link. Besides, doesn’t it say /e/OS browser in the application, not bromite?
So as a user and buyer of a smartphone /e/ oriented privacy and not security, I have assimilated well, I wonder about the interest of the technical goal. So, is there one I haven’t understood? Please explain, avoiding answers like "this project is geared towards degooglized privacy and not security, or more ironically, to be safe, turn off your data.
In comparison, I wonder what the effects and reactions would be if in our hyper-connected world or in the communities of open source or proprietary PC distributions, browsers and their CVEs had been out of date for several months.
I thank you in advance for enlightening the novice that I am, hoping to bring a constructive brick other than financial, and that this topic will be closed quickly but this time by an evolution on your part.
PDF Viewer has the same issue. F-Droid actually actively warns users who have installed the version there for being unsafe and shows a message recommending to uninstall it.
But these are customized by the /e/ team to give a more unified and consistent user experience across the apps that ships with the system, so my guess is that they need some time to redo all that work on alternative apps now and find a way to reliably migrate all user data such as bookmarks when the update happens.
I agree it’s not an ideal situation and it is in fact what’s keeping me from unconditionally recommending /e/ as an everyday system for casual novice users just yet.
the cromite repos are now where the current browser (bromite) was a few months ago in terms of automation / CI: just getting into it. I was hopeful then, I’m hopeful now. It needs to be a checkbox item for every /e/ release to update the browser - but unless well automated in building this will take away from other tasks, as will fixing introduced regressions by updates (seen that happen last time bromite got attention). Automated testing of chromium after all those (c/b)romite patches were applied is another thing besides building that beast. Good luck!
