Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

librewolf-community.gitlab.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 310 posts

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

#121

Post by hnarn »

tristor wrote: post #108

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…

If anything, these types of projects should come as some sort of external wrapper to help you compile or configure the software to give you the wanted behavior.

I don’t know a lot about how Arch’s AUR works but this seems like something that could be made an AUR package for example with special configuration while still using “base” Firefox to put it together, rather than profiling it as a new product.

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

#122

Post by spoctrial »

dmos62 wrote: post #110
solox3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The vast majority of people will not read about the collected telemetry, even fewer will read it and then make a decision to opt-in.The telemetry is optimizing for the vast majority, not the loud minority, hence opt-out works better in order to cater to a larger group of users. Your voting analogy is really bad.

With that said, I don't really like telemetry and will turn it off.

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

#123

Post by nsonha »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #103
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…

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?

Nationalize new browsers and OSes' development, or subsidize them. Governments do it with things like energy, space tech aviation and even telecom, but surprisingly not their software foundation.

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

#124

Post by travisgriggs »

1_player wrote: post #80
iandinwoodie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Out of curiosity, why do you think "libre" is a terrible moniker? For me, as a fan of open source, Libre-something means something focused on being open source, than being a good product. And in my humble opinion, open source governance is generally not good at making big sweeping, or even just focused changes when needed, so the "Libre" moniker to me has an aftertaste of "good enough, but could be much better" com…

Totally agree. Love the Wolf part of the name. Do not like Libre. Would have rather seen any of just Wolf, WebWolf (alliterates), WolfWolfGo (couldn’t help myself), FireWolf (ties to original), etc.

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

#125

Post by alexmcc81 »

Once I would have used this, but I can't just can't bring myself to trust forks by small or unknown teams. We trust browsers with passwords to everything in our lives, like our bank details. The FAQ doesn't even cover who created LibreWolf. Why should I trust them?

Even if I do trust the developers, are they really capable of keeping a modern complex browser secure in the hostile environment of todays internet? It has millions of lines of code in multiple languages with a history going back 2 decades. I can't find:

- who is responsible for the project security

- their CVE policies

- policies for back porting Firefox patches etc

- update schedules

They also removed the auto-updater which is critical to ensuring browsers get the latest patches.

I'm really skeptical about the (undocumented) "hundreds of privacy/security/performance settings and patches" they claim to have implemented. What exactly cannot be achieved through settings and addons?

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

#126

Post by veidr »

chinathrow wrote: post #100
solarkraft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, what the fuck was that?

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

#127

Post by djbusby »

I made a fork, of Firefox, just to remove Pocket. That part was easy-ish. Maintaining it is difficult, cause code changes a lot. Building FF doesn't take long (Gentoo, 8 cores, 64G RAM). I wish I knew more about code so I could fix the rendering issues. I'd love to see FF the core of some apps, like Chromium. I tried that with Servo but, I don't know enough (and it keeps freezing up)

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

#129

Post by kovac »

throwawayswede wrote: post #14
fsflover wrote: 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…

I'm absolutely with you on this. In fact, when I heard about the servo team and the CEO's salary, I stopped using Firefox. Now I mostly use qutebrowser (and Vivaldi for stuff I need more security).

I will start using Firefox when it leaves Mozilla and I'd pay a subscription for it. For me, the ideal situation is a lean team (hopefully only the devs, because I'm not paying any useless middle or high level managers a penny) start developing it for a fee. Just the browser will do, no password managers, no vpns, no nonsense. I already pay for subscriptions for those.

I've seen many here on hacker news expressing willingness to pay and the only reason that they don't is because they don't want to pay for other Mozilla nonsense but Mozilla doesn't want to open a direct channel for the community to support the Firefox team. I find this outrageous. Clearly, they are using Firefox, its very talented devs and the image of their noble fight for a private internet to fill the pockets of executives who don't know shit about engineering or the ethos of opensource software.

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

#130

Post by proactivesvcs »

I recently looked at the changes they make to the default preferences and so many are nothing to do with privacy, and some of those that are also reduce the user's safety (e.g. disabling Google Safebrowsing). I'd advise any prospective users to comb over the changes very carefully before using it.
Post reply on HN