The Elixir web browser, /e/OS’s web browser, now being built for Linux, macOS and soon Windows. “Yet another web browser?” Yes, because we don’t see a fast, generic, neutral, strongly privacy-respecting browser that everyone can find and use today. We’re not making a new startup out of this. We just want a nice, ethical browser that works for everyone.
Im wondering if it would be a better course of action to focus on other things for now, preinstall Firefox, accept the downsides of Firefox and then switch to Ladybird as soon as it is ready. It would make a great choice if one cares about privacy and also ethical browsers. Altough one would have to wait for a year or so until it gets into beta.
Also I have the following question: Is Elixir open source? I have not found the source code but may have overlooked something.
This was under the header voice to text, which does not equal a LLM AI, even in this day and age. If you read the next paragraph after the one you quote you will see that making use of an openAI API is precluded and even any implementation of a LLM AI, since they want all data to stay on the device.
PS: an local implementation is unlikely anyway, since handheld devices generally lack the hardware to yield any useful benefits.
hello,
about devices will there be new compatible devices added this year ? gaël talks about 2027 for new devices, but what about 2026 ? lots of supported devics are now quite old, and I would like to install /e/os on a quite recent one, but not too expensive.
Thanks for the update, Gael. That sounds really promising!
2 remarks:
For the browser Elexir, I really hope it will be based on Firefox and not on Chrome/Chromium (otherwise we will continue depending on the usual suspects)..
For the B2B version I hope to see a handout style PDF document - ideally in English, French and German - as soon as you are ready to launch to a greater public..
Post the release we look forward to your comments and suggestions. Based on which we will enhance and improve these features further in future releases.
I’m looking forward to some of these features! On-device voice-to-text will be huge; I’ve avoided using it for the longest time because of privacy concerns, but this will be great! Similarly, I’ve been using Sygic GPS for quite some time; I’d like an additional option, so looking forward to the maps as well! Backup/restore has been an interesting ride; I used Titanium Backup during the early days of Android, and moved to Swift Backup thereafter, but a first-party backup/restore solution will be amazing!!
A few thoughts/questions, if I might…
One long-awaited feature I’d love to see somewhere on the roadmap (whether for a 4.2 release or 5.0 release) would be text messaging through a browser interface. Whether it’s using the Wi-Fi IP of the phone, or a link to Murena Cloud, that would be huge if practical to add to the roadmap.
I know, I know, I’m the one-and-only broken record on this…but is there ANY intention of bringing some of these features to the self-hosted instance of /e/Cloud? Will there be a self-hosted implementation of the MDM or the video chat or the device backup functions?
More to the ‘comments and suggestions’ statement here, one of the awkward parts of providing feedback is that the weekly updates and deployment announcements seem to only want requests from users running official builds of /e/OS, rather than the community builds. I certainly understand this to an extent, but this announcement talks about the intention of having a wide variety of available hardware, which seems to involve the community builds at some level. I am 100% okay with community build feedback being treated differently than official builds, but might I submit that there be some means by which users running community builds can still submit feedback for review, even if it is understandably deprioritized?
Thank you, Gael, Manoj, and the rest of the team!!
I think there might be a misunderstanding. What is not wanted in Manoj’s weekly update or version feedback topics is feedback from beta testing versions. Community builds feedback is wholly fine. Perhaps the term “inofficial” or “unofficial” was used – this would mean the beta versions, not the community builds.
Community builds are as much a part of our system as the official.
We do not differentiate in bugs raised on either version. The bugs on the community builds are also reported and resolved. You can check on gitlab for this. The only difference is in most of the cases we do not own the community devices and as such do not have access to them for the testing part.
Popular community devices eventually make it to the official list. We have always welcome device maintainers who can step up and take up build and debug of these devices so that our range of maintained devices can grow. Our testing team included users of community and official builds.
Feel free to share issues on community devices if not shared earlier. We always look forward to bug reports and feedback on all our supported devices.
On a similar eIDAS topic, it would be great if /e/OS v4 would have working support for european official e-ID cards (OTOH, at least Germany, Italy, Slovenia have them and they don’t work on /e/OS)
I wrote one of the NFC postings above which could not yet be resolved. I’d like to point out that my Samsung Galaxy S8 actually supports extended NFC (as stated on Ausweis.App device list), so the problem is not the phone itself but rather the driver support for this feature.