[guardian-dev] Build your own browser: A Maven repository for GeckoView

Nathan of Guardian nathan at guardianproject.info
Fri Jul 11 09:55:30 EDT 2014


(let's keep this discussion open on guardian-dev list)

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Amogh Pradeep <amoghbl1 at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> Hey n8fr8, so what's it going to be? Do we use fennec or just gecko 
> view? In my opinion, I think it's better to use fennec, although it's 
> not going to be an easy task to move the torbrowser patches to it 
> just yet!

My greatest concern is that Fennec seems to have a huge amount of 
features (web apps, marketplace, offline reading, mozilla sync, etc), 
many of which are unique to Android. We need to make sure all of that 
code is secured, properly proxied, doesn't leak DNS, etc. 

If we use GeckoView inside of Lightning, we have a much simple browser, 
albeit one that still supports tabs, bookmarks, etc.


> I spoke to Georg Koppen  and he said that the next update to the 
> browser bundle will come out later this year when firefox 31 ESR is 
> released, he said that this release will need the plugins to be 
> modified to suit the new structure of the browser which is going to 
> be similar to the mobile browser. So the best thing to do right now, 
> I think, is to continue hacking on Fennec and making it as secure as 
> possible while we wait for 31 to release, once that releases, we can 
> finish the browser and make it complete like the desktop browser.

Okay, so good to know that the desktop and mobile browser roadmaps will 
be converging. Hopefully, then the Tor Browser patches will grow to 
cover all the features I listed above.


> Also, I've pulled the git repo and built it, it's very simple and can 
> easily be automated, I still haven't figured out the part on how to 
> make it create an apk from cli , will figure this out and we'll be 
> able to put this up in the coming week hopefully!

Well, at some points its either an ant or maven command in the right 
directly!

Please continue to work on your BUILD write-up, and setting up a new 
git repo with the mozilla one as an external git submodule.

+n
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