dear stoutner and gang,

i really admire your work, even thought i barely just learned about it a few days ago.

12 kids with the same smiley wife?! it consultant? almost enough to keep you busy... i trust you already know you got many big blessings there.

a bit more than a week ago i learned about icecat, this web browser made by gnu and based off firefox, which seems to fulfill a lot of (or perhaps even all of) my "freedom needs" as i don't feel like i need to go as radical as tor/onion on a borrowed computer.

i also just recently (nov 2024) restarted to use anything like a "desktop", as i lived since 2019 with mobile-only, and even tried a linux phone (sadly, it failed).

you can learn all about me on the web. perhaps start on http://ahoxus.org/~acauema

anyway, i can easily see you value "free software" a lot, but at the same time i found nothing on your redmine around those topics (gnu, icecat, librejs, fsf, etc), and i also see some margin for a lot of improvements and features on android privacy browser.

so for now i will concentrate all here, and if this discussion evolves we can create as many topics as needed.

# icecat¶

why not join forces with icecat? i found pba on fdroid because icecat ain't maintained there. and, kinda of ironically, icecat has binaries for windows, mac and gnu, while your browser only has binaries for android. i know they stand as quite different browsers, but to me they play the exact same role: allow my computer experience to better respect my freedom.

i like very much the simple "js toggle" button on pba, and i kinda miss such a simple solution on my current icecat setup. but perhaps it makes sense to keep my desktop toggle more granular as it stands.

# librejs¶

on icecat i use librejs, which would probably make a great addition to pba. perhaps along with jshelter. no idea how difficult it would be to simply "add" such extensions to pba, but for sure i don't need extension support.

# fsf and gnu¶

i noticed you use "open source" on stoutner.com and i believe you will enjoy to learn more about what that means by digging more onto fsf. here might give you a good start: http://gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

i personally feel that fsf and rms themselves help to promote all this confusion, because they get so pedantic on the words that they often forget they keep a (much needed) radical stance in favor of transparency and "user freedom". gpl license only exists and works because of fsf "copyleft" principles, and only agpl3+ can really safeguard all "user freedoms". very long story, i can't quite summarize it here.

# firefox sync¶

finally, i would really enjoy if i could sync my passwords and, above all, browsing/tab history, across my icecat/pba, like i can with firefox. no idea how you/we could ever exactly achieve this and keep it "free, private, and convenient", but i hope borrowing ideas from the fediverse would eventually work. i personally still have not found a very good and cheap enough "central host" for all my needs, or even a cluster of hosts that simply work for me, and i lost all my self hosted fediverse in this process, but well, just wanted to bring this topic here.

## zen "firefox", git, and etc¶

still on the "firefox" topic and my peculiar needs around it, i modified my icecat very little bit to look like firefox's zen browser (if you never tried arc, you probably don't know what you missed), by asking any lgm (large generative model ai) to create me a simple userchrome.css for it, and they also suggested me to use sideberry extension. it works very well, i get to enjoy my otherwise limited "desktop" screen "real estate" much better this way, as i prefer to only go as big as 20cm screen on a laptoblet (sadly, i still could not get a real gnu os on the only laptoblet i found, and now i got stuck with this dell latitude and windows, on yet another sidestory).

i dunno. perhaps i should just add librejs to firefox and "be content" with it for now. and perhaps i will. but i never felt very good with mozilla, and zen even also use github (which of course i hate - i only allow myself to use a few quite "bad" accounts, mostly 2: telegram and tiktok. i even tried to keep using github, but after microsoft they eventually locked me out and i will never bother to create a new account there again).

boy, i do need to update ahoxus.org/fupl !

# too long; didn't read and for sure didn't dig the links¶

thanks for sharing your work with privacy browser android!

i wish you all the best.

sorry, i don't know exactly why i spent over an hour writing all this, but i do hope you will find something valuable for you here.

cheers!