LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by _rdvw » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #85

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…

Iceraven is currently two major versions behind. https://divestos.org/misc/ffa-dates.txt

I maintain a hardened fork called Mull. I also help maintain Fennec F-Droid. Both are available on F-Droid!

Of extra note, both Iceraven, Mull, and Fennec F-Droid are based on Fenix, not Fennec. Fennec is any Firefox for Android before version 68 and is not secure.

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

#102

Post by nsonha » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

ExtraE wrote: post #47

_jal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can’t tell if this is supposed to be serious, but just in case [1]. In case it is, really, shut down the web? What would that look like? Why would we do it? How? How can “browsers are expensive” possibly be worth doing something that extreme? [1] https://xkcd.com/1454/

The majority of the web should be standardized uniformed wizards. Then people can apply whatever the skin they want onto all of the web. We don't want to deal with all kinds of design that are hard to make, require crazy powerful browsers, and was asked for by no one anyway.

Fancy UIs are made to slow people down in their tasks and draw attention to things that don't matter to what they want to do.

Web developers and creative people like to think the web is their playground but really the most important role of the web should be delivering informations and services efficiently, and get the hell out the way.

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

#103

Post by wintermutestwin » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

mfer wrote: post #30

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?

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…

Is it becoming a truism that (in this space) the profit motive will inevitably lead to user abuse?

Maybe we need more 501c3 and benefit corps providing basic stuff like an internet browser?

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

#104

Post by cmeacham98 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

mg wrote: post #92

nsonha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people don't close and open their browser between page visits, so time spend opening/closing the browser is a magnitude of importance less than time spent loading the page. I'd rather have a browser that takes 10secs to start and 0.1secs to render a page than 2sec to start and 1sec for each page render.

Additionally, timing externally like this ends up indirectly measuring unrelated metrics like the speed of your DNS server and internet download speed. I've seen people with particularly shoddy ISP DNS experience a 0.5-1sec swing in page load times after the DNS entry gets cached.

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

#105

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #66

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?

>Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? [...] What's preventing other forks from taking off Some of the replies to your question state "money" but there are also more fundamental reasons of choosing Chromium over Gecko: technical functionality and performance (especially on mobile) . You'd think an ex-Firefox programmer and Mozilla co-founder such as Brendan Eich would have chosen Gecko for Brave but he…

I neither want nor need DRM to work.

I'd rather have the ability of ad-blocking and similar extensions to work on a deeper level, instead of crippling them, like on chromium-based browsers.

What about mono-culture and the risk there of?

edit: Availability of working DRM is what it all boils down to.

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

#106

Post by wintermutestwin » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

jfk13 wrote: post #93

_jal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? >Telemetry isn't surveillance.

(honest question) Why is this necessary then: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

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

#107

Post by xbdm » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

LibreWolf is a pretty good firefox fork, But i would always use firefox with tweaks and user.js. Don't trust forks much, As i rather put my data with firefox plus mullvad vpn works with them on their vpn service. And mullvad is a really good privacy vpn...

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

#108

Post by tristor » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

I examined this and it appears that you can get the same effect yourself by enabling ETP strict mode, disabling telemetry and suggestions, and installing uBlock Origin in Firefox, which is a pretty common configuration for a lot of people. I suppose it's easier to just install this and have that already set up, but it's not exactly hard to do this in Firefox for the average HN reader and you most likely /already have/, so this gives you nothing except lagging security updates from an unknown developer.

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

#109

Post by thomquaid » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #77

iandinwoodie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why do you think "libre" is a terrible moniker?

Because nobody knows how to pronounce it, for one. Is it /libre/ (Standard Spanish) or /libʁə/ (Standard French) or /libχ/ (Northern French, esp. Parisian) or /la͡ɪbɚ/ (RP import) or /la͡ɪbɛɹ/ (GA import) or /libɹe/ (GA Spanish import)? But that's a symptom of a different pair of issues, namely: (1) it's ambiguous what language the word is in, and (2) neither of those languages are really tech field lingua francas (E…

Libre comes from Latin, via Norman and New Orleans French, to American English. It seems to me quite well chosen, as tech lingua franca.

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

#110

Post by dmos62 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

solox3 wrote: post #99

Communitivity wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This could be solved by a lot of transperancy about what collected telemetry is saying. A user can then check if the users that opted-in to telemetry are representative of his own use cases and thus make an informed decision if he should opt-in as well (if he's not well represented). Telemtry is a lot like voting.