fennecbuild VS nightly-crimes

I use a fork called Fennec which is Firefox stable with the proprietary bits removed. Also Mull is a great fork, which is Firefox Stable with most of the privacy enhanced features from arkenfox js which enables things like fingerprint resistance. This causes a lot more breakage though, so recommend to use it as a secondary browser. Both are available on fdroid, neither requiring Google Play.

Use this page to report Fennec F-Droid bugs. If you report an issue that also affects the official Firefox app, they'll notify Mozilla.

Bug report: FIDO2 WebAuthn not supported.

It isn't missing but removed due to depending on the proprietary Google Play Services library. There was a work in progress replacement: https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/issues/34

I would not use mull browser. I haven't gotten around in making a PSA. But the source code comes from 1 person in Russia. this is source code of mull, and the pg states its a fork of relan and if you click on relan's name you will see he is based in Russia. So one person is responsible for mull and another person is responsible for the back end. During this time of genocide of the Ukrainian people its my choice to not support anything with the word Russia. Each to their own.

It looks like this is the german language version of Firefox Focus. If you like firefox you should check out Mull. It is essentially a fennecbuild (DeBlobbed Firefox) that has been hardenned and contains upstream patches from the Tor Uplift Project.

> This seems to favor c++, in which basically anything imaginable can be done with macros, and any other language can be implemented.

Pfft. C++ macros can't even run a different compiler:

https://github.com/m-ou-se/nightly-crimes/blob/main/yolo-rus...

There is no nightly or stable compiler; they're just different modes that the compiler can run in. You can compile code that uses nightly features with just the stable toolchain; see nightly-crimes.

That being said, you can use nightly features on the stable compiler. The stable compiler is totally capable of compiling them, it just refuses to without some macro black magic.

More specifically, unsafe blocks may violate the compiler's security guarantees and procedural macros actually run inside the compiler process at build time. Declarative macros do this too, but they're far too restricted to allow shenanigans. Procmacros can disable Rust's stability guarantees[0].

[0] https://github.com/m-ou-se/nightly-crimes

> [ https://github.com/m-ou-se/nightly-crimes nightly-crimes! blows away your compiler, running it again in a new environment where it will allow nightly features even though you've got a stable compiler installed... ]

That macros have access to the entire language including arbitrary IO is the defining feature of proc macros. The insanity here is the Rust compiler team adding the `RUSTC_BOOTSTRAP` env var which is used to build rustc stable which uses nightly features.

All nightly-crimes does is use `std::process::Command` to rerun the compiler with the variable set [1], which tells rustc to throw all concepts of stability out the window.

I haven't been following developments but one of the ideas (even has a PoC iirc) was to build and run proc macros as web assembly to improve build times and prevent such shenanigans.

[1] https://github.com/m-ou-se/nightly-crimes/blob/main/yolo-rus...