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LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

librewolf-community.gitlab.io

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Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#51

Post by kgwxd »

secondaryacct wrote: post #42
mfer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a successful project takes A LOT of work. For something this size it’s not a side projects amount of work. How do the people working on it get money to cover their bills? If they don’t have this they will work on something that does that. A financial model is usually the blocker. Consider this, a lot of the people who work on Linux or many other projects are corporate backed. The companies pay the develop…

And the clients pay the companies. When we ll start buying browsers they ll stop tracking us

Unlikely. I can't name even 1 major paid for product that doesn't have telemetry and other forms of tracking.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#52

Post by Sebb767 »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #39
Sebb767 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we see quite a lot of Chromium forks - Brave, Vivaldi and Edge come to mind. For Firefox, the number seems to be a lot lower.

Edge, for example, is a fork maintained by Microsoft. It is a strategic project for a multi-billion company. That is not comparable to a fork of your average open-source project.

But it's absolutely comparable to a fork of Firefox. This does not solve the GPs question, why do so many people fork Chrome instead of Firefox.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#53

Post by qwerty456127 »

secondaryacct wrote: post #42
mfer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a successful project takes A LOT of work. For something this size it’s not a side projects amount of work. How do the people working on it get money to cover their bills? If they don’t have this they will work on something that does that. A financial model is usually the blocker. Consider this, a lot of the people who work on Linux or many other projects are corporate backed. The companies pay the develop…

And the clients pay the companies. When we ll start buying browsers they ll stop tracking us

Perhaps, but they will still optimize to maximize sales then, i.e. do what sells to as many people as possible, not what is good for you (an advanced user in particular). In fact I'm Okay with Firefox but would rather pay for a good alternative to Facebook where I would be a customer rather than a commodity.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#54

Post by masklinn »

Sebb767 wrote: post #49
masklinn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brave Company trying to make money off of its fork. > Vivaldi Company trying to ??? > Edge Microsoft, who found that maintaining a chrome fork would be less expensive than playing catch-up with their own in-house browser .

And yet the all could have choose Firefox and you could say exactly the same.

Yes? I've no idea what you're implying. All the viable Chromium forks have large amounts of manpower and resources available.

The choice between forking Chromium and Firefox is mainly one of business[0]: Chrome has a >70% global marketshare, adding Edge & co even ignoring Safari it's probably around 80. Since Google also keeps pushing their own stuff, that means forking Chromium gives you much better compatibility guarantees.

[0] though the history of Chromium — and Webkit before that — forks also means there's probably a lot more knowledge floating around about maintaining such a fork, especially since Chromium itself was originally a fork (running concurrently with its source and regularly synch-ing from it, forking a dead codebase or hard-forking with no sync is a different concern)

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#55

Post by freddref »

Tepix wrote: post #41

This brings up the questions: How can i disable as much telemetry as possible when using the standard Firefox? What am i missing if i go to , search for "telemetry" and set everything to false ? Are there drawbacks to blocking the hostname incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org in Pi-hole?

Surely there's a way of scripting this...

Something like this: https://github.com/shawnanastasio/firefox-privacy-restorer

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#56

Post by hezag »

jl6 wrote: post #45

So my choice is to trust one of either: 1. The Mozilla developers who are capturing telemetry, but probably just using it to push ads (at worst, and possibly not even that). 2. Some new devs who may have good intentions, but who are unknown to me, who are not capturing telemetry, but nevertheless have control over my browser.

It's just a custom build of the latest Firefox version with some patches applied. Everything is very well documented and you can build it by yourself, there is no need to trust "some new devs who may have good intentions"

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#57

Post by solarkraft »

I’ve tried all the Firefox forks I could find, including LibreWolf. It’s not your no-brainer “Non-Mozilla Firefox” you can just switch to.

Basic browsing may work, but nothing remotely close to “web-app” will, because they disabled all modern APIs due to privacy concerns.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#58

Post by solarkraft »

mgbmtl wrote: post #43
yosito wrote: post #2

Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…

I don’t mind telemetry that much. I mind Pocket, ads and whatever bullshit they’ll push next week.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#59

Post by ReactiveJelly »

mgbmtl wrote: post #43
yosito wrote: post #2

Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…

and it would be fine if it was opt-in. syncthings telemetry is very transparent, so I started enabling it on my nodes. but I hate when programmers who should absolutely know the difference conflate opt-in and opt-out.

Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

#60

Post by jfk13 »

jl6 wrote: post #45

So my choice is to trust one of either: 1. The Mozilla developers who are capturing telemetry, but probably just using it to push ads (at worst, and possibly not even that). 2. Some new devs who may have good intentions, but who are unknown to me, who are not capturing telemetry, but nevertheless have control over my browser.

> probably just using it to push ads

Telemetry isn't about "pushing ads".

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

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