I had a quick peek at iodé lately and found some choices odd. Could you please enlighten me on the following topics ?
Why is iodé proposing Qwant as default search engine even though it is quite known now that Qwant lacks in indexing and relies heavily on Bing results [1] ? Qwant co founder is also under the headlights for allegedly spying on coworkers, which is not really a good news for a search engine pretending to value privacy over all [2]. Duckduckgo seems at the time a better alternative, while Brave search engine looks promising.
Why is iodé using a cutom fork of firefox instead of the regular one ? It seems like unnecessarily adding work for the dev to maintain while delaying important security updates, and I did not find anything in the doc explaining what differs in the fork from the original.
All-in-all, great job for this OS, and I hope you will be considering opening the sources of the blocker soon to allow for third party audits, for I do not fully trust closed source / obfuscated code.
Hi and thank you for your input.
1 - We chose Qwant as default engine as we thought it was the most mature in Europe where we sell iodé phones. We haven’t tested Brave search yet and may consider adding it to suggested search engine; and also reconsider our default search in the future.
2 - As we changed the default search engine and due to trademark restrictions, the browser was renamed. Some telemetry & trackers have also been removed from the regular firefox though there is at the time no doc on it, we will probably make one!
Hi,
Did Jelly automatically get installed after installing the update?
As some users may prefer to use Jelly instead of the iodé Firefox-based browser, our team maintains up-to-date Jelly via F-Droid; but it shouldn’t install itself on its own
I can’t really tell for sure anymore, but I think it was automatically installed, when i updated the f-droid repositories for the first time after the update.
As @Antoine already explained, our initial purpose was to change the default search engine. We then added more search engines (and btw, Brave search engine has been added to the next release thanks to your suggestion) and removed telemetry as much as possible (work still in progress). No documentation, but public repositories: iode / os / apps / Iode Browser · GitLab and iode / os / apps / Iodé Browser Components · GitLab.
And of course, this work implies some maintaining overhead and we cannot give updates as soon as they are published by firefox. But well, is it so crucial to get them that fast?.. if the answer is yes for you, then you can use the preinstalled apps uninstaller and install the regular firefox, or whatever browser you prefer.
About Jelly: it should have not been installed automatically, and there’s not reason for that…
We wanted to include a more powerful browser in the rom, that’s why we switched from Jelly to a firefox fork; but Jelly is still a nice ligthweight browser, so we added more search engines and publish it separately on f-droid.