| 23 Feb 2026 |
 whispers [& it/fae] | hai i know it's been like a month but i will note: it is possible to build tor browser and mullvad browser from source. i have experiments with it in my personal dotfiles. but yeah, the issues felschr mentioned in that forum post are the thing stopping me from using it in any real capacity. fingerprinting is really fucking complicated and i'm like half sure that all of the --with-system-XXX flags that buildMozillaMach uses probably introduce fingerprinting issues somewhere (let alone far bigger things). avoiding that would require work from someone who is intimately familiar with firefox, tor browser, and the landscape of browser fingerprinting. | 14:38:24 |
| whispers [& it/fae] | the guix folks do actually build tor browser from source in their own repositories but frankly i'm skeptical they've done the work to make sure all of those risks are mitigated | 14:41:21 |
| whispers [& it/fae] | simply because i doubt there's anyone on the planet who knows exactly what that work even is | 14:41:44 |
 K900 | Fingerprinting is not a game you can win tbh | 14:41:58 |
 hexa | I have doubts in most distros building a proper Firefox with all the features it provides | 15:10:24 |
| hexa | e.g. Firefox 95 added a sandboxing feature that requires wasm cross compiling https://blog.mozilla.org/attack-and-defense/2021/12/06/webassembly-and-back-again-fine-grained-sandboxing-in-firefox-95/ | 15:11:36 |
 emily | I think most distros just have fixed prepackaged cross compilers for things like that | 15:40:47 |
| hexa | not sure what "most" here means | 15:41:53 |
| hexa | arch, fedora and gentoo provide proper firefox builds | 15:42:08 |
| hexa | other distros less so and especially debian only provides a very limited esr edition | 15:42:30 |
| hexa | at which point … get the upstream flatpak instead 🤷♂️ | 15:42:58 |
| emily | I guess Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Alpine, Gentoo is "most distros" for me 😅 | 17:37:10 |
| emily | I didn't realize Debian only had ESR, even on testing/unstable. it looks like they do have the WASM stuff though | 17:37:32 |
|  @kraem:ne.bul.ae left the room. | 17:38:52 |
 @aloisw:julia0815.de | Unfortunately that doesn't have all sandbox layers either, due to user namespaces not working. | 17:42:14 |
| hexa | oh snap 🫣 | 17:50:49 |
| emily | would you rather I say NixOS is like most distros? :D | 17:51:17 |
 nbp | under the hood, yes. It just has the greatest hood of all :P | 17:52:31 |
| hexa | alpine looks fine too | 17:53:33 |
| 24 Feb 2026 |
| hexa | https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/goodbye-innerhtml-hello-sethtml-stronger-xss-protection-in-firefox-148/ | 13:17:42 |
| 1 Mar 2026 |
|  @ohchase:envs.net removed their profile picture. | 20:11:52 |
| @ohchase:envs.net left the room. | 20:11:52 |
| 2 Mar 2026 |
|  Hythera joined the room. | 15:25:04 |
|  ~dopamine~ joined the room. | 20:39:10 |
| 5 Mar 2026 |
| nbp | Personal question, How would you rate the effort needed to package Firefox over the last year? | 14:14:57 |
| hexa | managable if you have the build capacity and can arrange it to be an async task | 14:57:48 |
| hexa | every major bump means: 4 platforms, 2 releases = 8 packages, 4 nixos tests, times two for backports, times three during for two months in the year during release season | 14:58:46 |
| hexa | on a moderate machine with a modest number of cores (say 10) the build takes me 2h45m until the nixos test is complete | 14:59:35 |
| hexa | on a fast machine (epyc 2nd gen, 64 cores) its more like 1h45m | 14:59:56 |
| hexa | so not a meaningful difference if I queue the builds and leave it running while going afk and doing other things | 15:00:41 |
