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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

#211

Post by toyg »

sfink wrote: post #114
jasode wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

If you read that tweet, it mainly says that they made the choice based on DRM licensing. Well, plus a vague "it lost on many dimensions in a head to head comparison enumerating gaps vs. Chrome". Which I can't argue, because there are no specifics to disagree with. That said, I work on Gecko and it is indeed an old crufty codebase with numerous issues. From what I've seen of Blink, it seems surprisingly similar (overa…

The continuous struggle to get Gecko used by any non-Mozilla project should also carry weight: there are many reasons why Apple went with the arguably-inferior KHTML engine when they started their own browser, and why the resulting library was quickly adapted all over the world - when arguably Gecko had had by then a headstart of a decade or so. Reportedly, embedding WebKit in one's codebase was basically trivial, whereas with Gecko was almost impossible.

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

#212

Post by NoGravitas »

chrisjc wrote: post #159
hnarn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Forgive my ignorance, but couldn't this be done as an extension? (Maybe even withing uBlock Origin itself, if they were to add an option?) Or do extensions not have access to these settings?

They don't. But honestly, it would be easy enough to have a script/program run to fix the settings while Firefox is not running.

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

#213

Post by caslon »

st3fan wrote: post #195
Scharkenberg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on their recent design changes (deprecation of compact mode, for example), they are either not collecting enough telemetry about the affected parts of the UI/UX, or they are ignoring what they have collected for whatever reason. Of course, there is a chance that telemetry confirms their vision, but based on the explicit feedback I've been seeing online, I doubt the rationality of their decision-making at least…

How do you compare strong voices of a few on a site like HackerNews or Reddit against many many many millions of data points of users around the world. Should written feedback overrule a bigger data set?

At the rate Firefox's market share is currently declining, it seems unlikely Mozilla actually has a finger on the pulse of the wider "millions [of users] around the world."

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

#214

Post by floatingatoll »

Scharkenberg wrote: post #175
criddell wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?

Based on their recent design changes (deprecation of compact mode, for example), they are either not collecting enough telemetry about the affected parts of the UI/UX, or they are ignoring what they have collected for whatever reason. Of course, there is a chance that telemetry confirms their vision, but based on the explicit feedback I've been seeing online, I doubt the rationality of their decision-making at least…

It is also possible that the telemetry shows that the vocal majority you perceive is, in fact, a vocal minority. I don’t have any more knowledge than you about whether that’s the case or not, but the possibility of being in the minority (and perhaps severely so) is absent from your list, and that deserves correction.

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

#215

Post by lowercased »

sfink wrote: post #144
throwawayswede wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Mozilla dev here, not speaking for Moz) "grab telemetery" - that data is really, really useful in making development decisions, and we are hyperparanoid about what we collect. From an armchair, it may seem like you can make the right guess about how to eg adjust garbage collection scheduling priorities, but actual data always surprises you in one way or another. It can make the difference between spending a month on…

> I really don't like to speculate on executive pay, but I'm pretty baffled why this is seen as such a big deal.

They lay off 250+ people - many of whom are the very people needed to make the technical improvements many users desire - while the executives get pay raises. You wonder why it's a 'big deal'?

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

#216

Post by OrvalWintermute »

legrande wrote: post #133

LibreWolf is mostly a bunch of policies. If you go into the preferences pane, you should see a note: 'Your browser is being managed by your organization'. When you click the link, there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like telemetry, auto-updates etc. It also has the about:config section heavily tweaked and modified. Doing all that on stock Firefox is a lot of work which is why I prefer the developers of LibreWolf t…

Having gone through most, if not all of the browser lockdown activities on FF, can concur completely - it is a huge time saver. I would vastly prefer to use a common approach for this, rather than my own ad hoc decisions for this.

Am very interested in LibreWolf for this reason.

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

#217

Post by Groxx »

st3fan wrote: post #195
Scharkenberg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on their recent design changes (deprecation of compact mode, for example), they are either not collecting enough telemetry about the affected parts of the UI/UX, or they are ignoring what they have collected for whatever reason. Of course, there is a chance that telemetry confirms their vision, but based on the explicit feedback I've been seeing online, I doubt the rationality of their decision-making at least…

How do you compare strong voices of a few on a site like HackerNews or Reddit against many many many millions of data points of users around the world. Should written feedback overrule a bigger data set?

While I broadly agree: data lies too. "X% more people use this now" says absolutely nothing about if they like it, or if it's doing what they want, or if you'll drive them off the system in a couple months because of it. It just says that X% more used it during the time you were watching.

You can use nothing but positive data-driven results to drive yourself out of existence, and it's rather easy. Direct, human feedback is absolutely essential.

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

#218

Post by md8z »

caslon wrote: post #213
st3fan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you compare strong voices of a few on a site like HackerNews or Reddit against many many many millions of data points of users around the world. Should written feedback overrule a bigger data set?

At the rate Firefox's market share is currently declining, it seems unlikely Mozilla actually has a finger on the pulse of the wider "millions [of users] around the world."

Is there anyone who you believe does have a finger on that pulse? If so, why? What can we learn from them?

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

#219

Post by proactivesvcs »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #142
proactivesvcs wrote: post #130

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.

How does google safe browsing make me safer? It’s just sending all my network data to google for them to tell me if it’s safe or not. If you don’t see the issue with sending every website you use to google for them to tell you if it’s safe I don’t know what to tell you. Sending your browsing history to a database has everything to do with privacy.

I suggest you look up how Google Safebrowsing works; it's not how you may think. I'm pretty anti-Google and I leave this feature switched on because I believe the trade-offs are worthwhile.

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

#220

Post by proactivesvcs »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #209
GhettoComputers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does google safe browsing make me safer? It’s just sending all my network data to google for them to tell me if it’s safe or not. If you don’t see the issue with sending every website you use to google for them to tell you if it’s safe I don’t know what to tell you. Sending your browsing history to a database has everything to do with privacy.

It's not even the privacy aspect alone. There have been repeated cases of absolutely legit, not even controversial sites landing on blacklists, for reasons of technical errors maintaining those, or some jurisdictions DMCAing some other site(s), hosted behind the same IP-range in the same data-center. Boom. Suddenly the site is gone, or at least you have to click around endless warnings about impending doom if you pro…

I came across a very annoying case of it blocking seclists.org for a few months but it eventually cleared up. Despite this, I still advocate for it. If one day it does start seeming to act maliciously I can simply push a button and it's switched off. Until then it provides a real benefit to security because a whole lot of nasty sites are blacklisted using the service.

If you think it's for nothing then perhaps it's worth looking into how the service works and how successful it is.

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