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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

#81

Post by Communitivity »

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?

Supposedly this will opt you out: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

One way is to use your firewall to block anything going to mozilla.org or firefox.com, or the subdomains. That probably gets most of it, but possibly not all. For example, Google has a number of non-Google.com subdomains, some of which seem to be used only for telemetry.

Another more involved way is to start WireShark or tcpdump and capture the traffic, then start Firefox and browse some, and then close Firefox and stop the capture. Now you have a list of all the traffic it tries to send, normal and telemetry. Sift out anything that looks suspicious and block the ip/domain via your firewall.

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

#82

Post by riedel »

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 have question: what is the rate of opt in into telemetry? I like the concept of donating your data to improve a product. I wonder if there would not be enough data if ppl could simply chose when installing.

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

#83

Post by mg »

One factor that is important to me when comparing browsers is resource consumption. I don't like it when my fans spin.

I wonder if the "time" tool that comes with Linux is a good way to quantify it? When I do "time firefox reddit.com", wait until the page is fully rendered (including the ads) and close the browser, I get:

    time firefox reddit.com
    
    real 0m13,089s
    user 0m9,411s
    sys  0m2,882s
Does that mean that Firefox used about 12s of CPU time to render the frontpage of Reddit? (I guess user+sys is the amount that counts)

"time firefox news.ycombinator.com" gives me about 7 seconds.

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

#84

Post by Communitivity »

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, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.

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

#85

Post by ojosilva »

solarkraft wrote: post #57

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.

I'm currently using Iceraven on my Android phone and it's mostly a great experience! It gives access to all sorts of add-ons to block ads, cookies and other internet annoyances, some of which are not yet available on the official FF Android app since Fennec was abandoned.

Even if speed were not 100% that of certain mobile browsers (I have not benchmarked them nor noticed any major differences), having no banners show up make up for it. I have no concerns with telemetry, but the Iceraven folks have cut down on some of the telemetry.

In fact I use Iceraven as my default YouTube mobile app, instead of the official app. With the right add-ons, it makes for a quite nice YT experience!

https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

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

#86

Post by est31 »

Sebb767 wrote: post #21
dralley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. The same is true of Chromium, btw.

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.

Due to its market share, Chromium has better website compatibility these days than Firefox. See the statement by the Brave creator on this: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1165348116398104576

Also, especially on mobile, Firefox is an extremely niche browser engine. The biggest browser forks in therms of global user count are actually not the likes of Edge, Brave, etc, but android Chromium forks popular in asia.

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

#87

Post by folkrav »

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

I'd be willing to bet whichever paid browser popped up would both still keep the telemetry _and_ fuck us with subscription based, you-won't-ever-own-your-browser payment scheme.

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

#88

Post by nsonha »

mg wrote: post #83

One factor that is important to me when comparing browsers is resource consumption. I don't like it when my fans spin. I wonder if the "time" tool that comes with Linux is a good way to quantify it? When I do "time firefox reddit.com", wait until the page is fully rendered (including the ads) and close the browser, I get: time firefox reddit.com real 0m13,089s user 0m9,411s sys 0m2,882s Does that mean that Firefox us…

you are counting bootstraping/closing the browser.

Check firefox devtools timeline for a detailed breakdown.

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

#89

Post by sundarurfriend »

EE84M3i wrote: post #34
user3939382 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully it's a lot different. If you proxy Firefox you'll see that even with everything turned off that you possibly can through the UI, Firefox phones home many times, especially during launch and exit.

I would be really surprised if the Firefox developers refused a patch adding a new about:config setting for whatever you're talking about.

When they get around to it in ten years.

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

#90

Post by gtirloni »

Communitivity wrote: post #84
mgbmtl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.

Almost nobody goes out of their way to enable telemetry because they want to help some project. Very few power users do (and they don't represent the majority in most cases) and I'd say zero regular users would care.
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