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

librewolf-community.gitlab.io

91–100 of 310 posts

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

#91
post #56
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"

> there is no need to trust

Providing you actually review the code and not just trust it because the code is there. Reviewing (a fork of) Firefox sounds like a big job, if can be done at all. Being a Firefox fanatic does not magically make you a rust programmer

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

#92
post #88
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.

Yes, that is what I want to look at. The real resource impact of starting the browser, looking at a website and closing the browser. Using an in-browser tool to measure that would be like asking a robber how much they stole.

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

#93
post #36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not thrilled with every decision Mozilla has ever made but I think people have gotten so used to the unlimited resources that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are able to pour into their unprofitable ecosystem moats that they've lost sight of what running a self sustaining business in this space would even look like.

> they've lost sight of what running a sustainable business in this space would look like Is the claim that it is economically impossible to create a browser without turning it in to surveillance malware? To the extent that's true, it is the best argument yet for shutting down the web.

Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? Precisely what surveillance are you referring to? Telemetry isn't surveillance. Recommended content (e.g. on the default New Tab page) doesn't involve surveillance.

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

#94
post #4

Genuine questions. Aren't such forks harming the actual Firefox developers by decreasing the Firefox user base? Doesn't it help the Google monopoly on the web?

No. Mozilla is actually helping Google build and maintain a monopoly on search (for money) and is accepting the scraps that Google leaves on the table from the browser market. Mozilla has continuously and repeatedly fucked up when it comes to defaulting to grab telemetry and shady deals with Google, to asking for money while spending way too much salaries for its execs for a supposed non-profit corporation (that is e…

Seriously, why are people down voting this? They have been paying the CEO a lot while laying off a ton off people at MDN!

I don't think Mozilla is intentionally helping Google, but they are bleeding a ton of money with community events etc, laying off people while giving this horrible execs increased salaries. Like seriously WTH?

Mozilla need to kill the current leadership, get lean on spenting and most importantly cater to their audience. They don't have much general users. A huge portion are hardcore fans, OpenSource folks, people who value privacy or anti-chrome. Pushing ads to this audience, is only going to accelerate the downfall.

Focus on pleasing power users and devs. Market on shit that matters to power users, sys admins, devs and privacy folks, journalists! Like containers, and dev tools (some of which are already cool). Then these folks will whole heartedly embrace it in their workplaces, recommend to friends and family. Devs will write things more for FF. And don't break extensions again! This is how you got us before. Do it again. Then the general audiences will come.

Currently all these power users an others are themselves not sure about Firefox. They are stuck with it cos neither can they donate directly to Firefox development, nor are they happy with the leadership decisions. They are just waiting till the last day of FF's existence so that they can be a lil more private until they have to move to Chrome based browsers.

When their heart was at the right place their tech sucked. Their tech is better now, but their heart is not in the right place.

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

#95
post #15

How is this any different from a standard Firefox install with telemetry turned off

It also comes preconfigured with a lot of good settings for privacy, like resist fingerprinting, 3rd party cookie stuff, etc...

I know you can turn this stuff on manually but it's convenient to have a fork that does it for you and turns off Mozilla's telemetry completely

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

#96
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP, but you, in GGP, said: >>>It's 20 million lines of security sensitive code. Of course it's difficult to properly fork. Did you forget to switch accounts? Which is it? Easy or hard?

>Did you forget to switch accounts? No, but nice accusation. > Which is it? Easy or hard? Could you spell out what the contradiction is, here? I said it's hard to fork both browsers, and then pointed out that the only real "community" ones are miniscule patchsets which pretty much exclusively delete code - that even then, the list is only one or two forks long for each browser - and the rest all have multiple full-ti…

The "contradiction", coincidentally the very same reason I wondered if you switched accounts, is your implication that the reasoning for the way things are is blindingly obvious, except for the exceptions obviously, but those are blindingly obvious too. Apologies, I didn't realize the rationale behind your posting; that straightforward explanatory paragraph clearly couldn't have been deployed without all the posturing, first.

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

#97
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?

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

There is https://gist.github.com/MrYar/751e0e5f3f1430db7ec5a8c8aa237b... as well (check out the comments, too).

Or https://gist.github.com/davinian/1991bb3486cbf6005b5320e93b3... but it is quite old I think.

In any case, make sure you know what you are disabling, because in the latter it suggests disabling WebSockets which you may not want to do.

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

#99
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.

"No one opts in" aside, any opt-in metrics you do collect tend to be skewed towards how the people who opt in, use the product. Anyone serious about making product decisions using opt-in metrics should be aware of this bias.

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

#100
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 that much. I mind Pocket, ads and whatever bullshit they’ll push next week.

I have some color packs for you, but they are only available briefly.
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