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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

#231

Post by chinathrow »

cpeterso wrote: post #163
chinathrow wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Additional "colorway" themes will be introduced seasonally, but the current colorway themes will not disappear. They will "graduate" to https://addons.mozilla.org/ .

To be honest that was not clear at all from this work-interferung modal after the upgrade to 94.0

It more read like some marketing FOMO inducing lingo like "use the new feature better now or you will miss out once they're gone".

Do you have a user panel at Mozilla to vet stuff like that? I would love to participate. Being a Moz suite user since 1998.

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

#232

Post by bityard »

robbedpeter wrote: post #225
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?

A technically competent user's feedback should be weighted at least one, if not tens or hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than anonymously gathered telemetry. Remove actual, intentional human communication from the loop and you're lost at sea - anyone can make the anonymous data mean anything, and then it's whomever can make the cleverest chart or analysis of the data that ends up directing decisions. Ignoring…

I agree with this so much.

Once it was clear that Chrome was destined to cater to the masses, Firefox should have done a hard pivot with an emphasis on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience. The best time to do this was a few years back when all of this was becoming obvious, but now with massive popular distrust of large tech companies like Facebook and Google making daily news, the second best time is now.

There's a reason I run Linux and BSD on every computing device I own, instead of Windows or Mac. It's not because it's easier to use (they are not), it is not because it has more bells and whistles (they do not). It's because at the end of the day, _I_ am the one in control of my computers, not some product manager who needs bullet points on his or her annual review.

There is no universe in which Firefox is going to successfully compete against Google at their own game, especially when Google is _still_ the majority source of their funding. I have no evidence for or against this, but my greatest fear is that the people at Mozilla who were passionate about the same things that I am passionate about have left out of frustration and the only ones left are there for the lifestyle and hipsterness of "working in tech" at a non-profit in a trendy city.

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

#233

Post by md8z »

bityard wrote: post #232
robbedpeter wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A technically competent user's feedback should be weighted at least one, if not tens or hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than anonymously gathered telemetry. Remove actual, intentional human communication from the loop and you're lost at sea - anyone can make the anonymous data mean anything, and then it's whomever can make the cleverest chart or analysis of the data that ends up directing decisions. Ignoring…

I agree with this so much. Once it was clear that Chrome was destined to cater to the masses, Firefox should have done a hard pivot with an emphasis on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience. The best time to do this was a few years back when all of this was becoming obvious, but now with massive popular distrust of large tech companies like Facebook and Google making daily news, the sec…

I cannot agree with it or your comment. I have seen these type of comments pop up in every Firefox thread on HN. It is so common for people to try to play armchair CEO. But when I actually dig into it, I have really never seen anyone with a competent vision of what a "competing browser" is supposed to look like. It all seems to boil down to "put the user in control of X feature and add a bunch of settings for it" or "don't remove Y feature that I used" or "bring back XUL" or something like that which I hope you can understand are not reasonable high-level directions. The various forks of firefox are well intentioned but these are all minor modifications, they don't try to do something different.

To illustrate what I mean here, if you want a fork with an emphasis on privacy you can just use LibreWolf. It is the entire thread we are responding to, the thing you want exists right now. But I don't see people exactly flocking to use that, your comment seems to not even acknowledge that it exists!

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

#234

Post by matthewmacleod »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #227
InTheArena wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically on the web more virulent, extreme content should always win against the quiet majority.

Is this sarcasm or sincere? I agree to a certain extent; informed people with good taste tend to be strongly opinionated.

Uninformed people with terrible taste generally seem to be even more strongly opinionated, though. I'm not sure we can draw many useful conclusions!

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

#235

Post by bityard »

duskwuff wrote: post #174
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…

> there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like […] auto-updates YIKES. Automatic updates are incredibly important for security. Disabling them by default is highly concerning. Does the browser support (manual) self-updates at all, or has that functionality been disabled entirely?

I have been burned often enough by software that auto-updates itself that I am positive I don't want it enabled by default on _my_ systems. Anywhere from between "this feature I really liked is gone" to "now it crashes every five minutes."

Perhaps more importantly, companies that offer software that can auto-update itself, can also make it so that the software uninstalls itself. Or worse, installs something you don't want. It also makes for an especially juicy target for supply chain attackers. So you have quite a bit of a double-edged sword there, from a security standpoint.

I wonder when we're going to stop pretending that there shouldn't be at least a fuzzy divide between software and systems intended for technical users and software for non-technical users. (And we should not be afraid to label them as such.) I fully agree with auto-updates for mass-market software but as a technical user, I don't want the system that I rely upon to make a living to constantly be changing out from underneath me.

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

#236

Post by agentdrtran »

junon wrote: post #228
tarasglek wrote: post #128

Author of Mozilla telemetry here. You can accomplish this with official firefox by blacklisting incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org domain, per https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=telemetry.moz...

Let's stop making privacy a techie-only thing, though. This should be a question a user chooses the first time they boot the browser, and Firefox should do its hardest to honor it.

Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

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

#237

Post by nuerow »

agentdrtran wrote: post #236
junon wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's stop making privacy a techie-only thing, though. This should be a question a user chooses the first time they boot the browser, and Firefox should do its hardest to honor it.

Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

> Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

How can you tell?

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

#238

Post by joshspankit »

agentdrtran wrote: post #236
junon wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's stop making privacy a techie-only thing, though. This should be a question a user chooses the first time they boot the browser, and Firefox should do its hardest to honor it.

Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating.

I suspect that for every scenario you can think of someone will be able to reply with solid logic about how it could be used in a way that’s bad and/or privacy-violating.

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

#239

Post by nuerow »

bityard wrote: post #232
robbedpeter wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A technically competent user's feedback should be weighted at least one, if not tens or hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than anonymously gathered telemetry. Remove actual, intentional human communication from the loop and you're lost at sea - anyone can make the anonymous data mean anything, and then it's whomever can make the cleverest chart or analysis of the data that ends up directing decisions. Ignoring…

I agree with this so much. Once it was clear that Chrome was destined to cater to the masses, Firefox should have done a hard pivot with an emphasis on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience. The best time to do this was a few years back when all of this was becoming obvious, but now with massive popular distrust of large tech companies like Facebook and Google making daily news, the sec…

> Once it was clear that Chrome was destined to cater to the masses, Firefox should have done a hard pivot with an emphasis on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience.

Why do you believe that catering to the masses implies not focusing on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience?

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

#240

Post by Jansen312 »

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?

Some vocal voices are superusers that can affect others to use or not. Think of them as like current social media influencers. FF userbase has been in decline for sometime now during which those vocal feedbacks had been largely ignore. Perhaps, that give some proof indication "should written feedback overrule a bigger data set"?
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