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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • On the latest F-droid blog post they listed this as a known issue:

    Fennec F-Droid was updated to 142.0.0 and got a lot of publicity, and not for how great it works, unfortunately. It appears the slow spell hit it too as there’s an issue using extensions that use webRequest listeners, like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, TamperMonkey and more, that delay the connections to websites on start. For now we recommend to try a couple of things. While disabling these extensions fixes it, we know that the Internet is unusable without ad blocking.

    • First trick is to disable the extension, wait, hear me out, just toggle it OFF then ON back again. (Small note here: while there are many ads related extensions out there, maybe it’s time to look at their usage a bit more and decide to keep only one. We’ve seen users installing them all thinking this will cover all angles, while the truth is they are messing with each others rules and you might end up more exposed than less.)
    • Second, the issue is seen when swiping the app away (where the app status is decided by Android, Schrödinger’s app paradox), but some users reported success if instead of swiping it you actually close it. The Close button appears in the main menu if you enable “Delete browsing data on quit” in Settings. eg. “Cached images and Files” is the least annoying option to select, careful not to select any of the others. So, when you want to close the app, just use the button and on the next start it should load pages normally.
    • Third, our own @linsui pointed that, we can just close the screen. […] When you open the app, if you see it stand there doing nothing, lock the device and then unlock it. We don’t understand why this works for some, but surely it has to do with libraries and drivers and magic numbers.

    As a reminder, there’s a reason why our fork of Firefox is named Fennec, it’s not about some code name anymore, but about the fact that our version is a work on top of Mozilla’s code. We need to extract all the bad (read non-FOSS, read privacy invading) code and give you a clean app that serves you and not some faceless corporation. Are we breaking some eggs to do this omelette? We sure are. And we do our best to serve it fast and tasty. Yet sometimes egg shells might end up in the final product.–