Regarding trackers, I’ve maintained my own blocklists along with a combined one from many permissive sources. Notably, using wildcard compression the list size is cut in half and can actually block more!
You can easily add it to your existing blocker such as uBlock Origin, Pi-Hole, Blokada/DNS66, etc.:
https://divested.dev/index.php?page=dnsbl
4 Likes
Once again I’m sorry not to find Vivaldi browser mentioned (I know it is because Vivaldi is not 100% open-source but they speak openly about that). I trust them. Yes, it’s a question of trust. It’s good to question things but at some point it’s a question of trust.
They are different. If you want the best security then you want to use Google Android. You’ll get some of the best security out there.
Of course, you can have “security” without privacy (and some try to tell us only without privacy you can really be secure…).
But you will not long have much privacy without some decent security to protect you from illegal actions.
So, technically there are maybe different issues (there always are), but finally one has to take into account all of them…
Chromium 98.0.4758.101 was released yesterday.
/e/OS WebView and Browser, based on Chromium 96, now totals 129 known security issues.
CVE-2022-0609 and CVE-2021-4102 are both actively being abused in the wild.
2 Likes
/e/ uses Bromite releases. An issue has been created to update to the latest Bromite release
5 Likes
However, everybody could install the latest Bromite build by himself https://github.com/bromite/bromite/releases
Thank you /e/ team for finally updating your browser. Seriously, thanks!
However that version 96.0.4664.183, is still a dead LTS branch and is still 11 security patches behind including CVE-2022-0609, upstream has replaced it with 98.0.4758.101.
Also note that Bromite has had patches for 97 and 98 created by a contributer, but rejected by its maintainer for seemingly no reason. The Bromite maintainer has also stated that they are not happy that /e/ depends on Bromite and yet has never contributed to Bromite.
2 Likes
@Anonyme (going for the camille with pointers in this thread), did the dual booting not present shenanigans any time recently for you?
I had a windows 10 machine with Linux that was suddenly unable to locate the second partition after some “update” (I’d kept it offline for a long time but wanted the convenience of a WiFi connections and learned my lesson)
- Download a file from there onto your device. For an FP the ARM64 would be the right one.
- When the file is on the device open a file manager and navigate to the file.
- The following depends on the file manager: Tap on the file to get a context menu, then select “Install”. If the context menu doesn’t open by tapping it’s somewhere else on a button or so.
Wrong Camille I guess 
Sorry, hope you’ll find your answer!
1 Like
haha indeed, my apologies!
I am not going to lie, that kind of does bother me a little bit. The fact that /e/ has not contributed to bromite. I hope this is not true.
Also it looks like mine is still on 96 version 
is this right?
I am curious, is there any reason that /e/ doesn’t just partner with bromite and ship their phones with bromite? That way people would benefit from the latest versions as well as give them the visibility so people from the /e/ community could contribute to that project. I will say I do like the default /e/ os browser.
That said, how do I know which apk to download from the github if I want to try bromite?
@Philbo
/e/OS is supposed to be shipping 100.0.4896.57 right now per Commits · master · e / os / Browser · GitLab
However even that version currently has 57 known security issues: https://divestos.org/misc/ch-dates.txt
If /e/ team is pinning browser/webview version to each release and not updating out of band they are downright harming their users.
The easiest way to get the correct Bromite for your device is to add their repo to F-Droid.
Otherwise you want the latest ChromePublic.apk file: Releases · bromite/bromite · GitHub
If you have an arm64 device you want the arm64 prefixed one, if you are unsure try arm64 first and use arm if it fails.
2 Likes
When you say “shipping” does that mean it will update automatically? Again mine is still showing a v 96.
Also, how does one add the bromite repo to fdroid? This is new lingo for me lol
@Philbo
I do not believe /e/OS provides out-of-band updates for the WebView, so it will only update every time you update the system.
For Bromite:
- install F-Droid
- open Bromite F-Droid repository | Bromite - take back your browser in your browser
- long press on the QR code and tap open in, then choose F-Droid
- F-Droid should open with the menu pre-filled out, then tap add
- Let it refresh the repos
- Then search for Bromite and install as any other app
3 Likes
You should get always the latest version here. I already said for the FP you need the top most arm64_ChromePublic.apk.
Install this. When you then startup Bromite instead of the stock browser app it will inform you by itself about further updates from time to time. This is shown by an icon in the upper right corner of Bromite. These updates are then also just APKs to download. There’s no automated update process. This means you must install them again manually.
(But using Fdroid is much better …)
Thanks @anon88181694 and @irrlicht. I was able to get the fdroid repo to work. Pretty slick. Had no idea you could do that.
1 Like