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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

#241

Post by nuerow »

tinus_hn wrote: post #221
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…

Until Firefox accidentally disables these settings or replaced them with new ones with new defaults, deprecates these plugins or introduces a new privacy invasion.

> Until Firefox accidentally disables these settings or replaced them with new ones with new defaults, deprecates these plugins or introduces a new privacy invasion.

Did anything of the sort ever happened at all or are we only entertaining thought experiments?

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

#242

Post by GhettoComputers »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #219
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.

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.

>Google maintains the Safe Browsing Lookup API, which has a privacy drawback: "The URLs to be looked up are not hashed so the server knows which URLs the API users have looked up". The Safe Browsing Update API, on the other hand, compares 32-bit hash prefixes of the URL to preserve privacy. The Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers use the latter.

>Safe Browsing also stores a mandatory preferences cookie on the computer.

>Google Safe Browsing "conducts client-side checks. If a website looks suspicious, it sends a subset of likely phishing and social engineering terms found on the page to Google to obtain additional information available from Google's servers on whether the website should be considered malicious". Logs, "including an IP address and one or more cookies" are kept for two weeks. They are "tied to the other Safe Browsing requests made from the same device."

Looks like it works exactly like I thought it did and is not useful to me and a privacy concern.

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

#243

Post by joshspankit »

floatingatoll wrote: post #214
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…

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.

While I agree with you and the way you’ve stated it, it should be widely known that tiny groups of highly technical people can unlock huge understandings about how to improve.

Look at the speedrunning community for example: sometimes it’s not just a tiny group, but a single person that sees something that the devs did not, and that can lead to fixing “wtf” bugs for everyone else.

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

#245

Post by joshspankit »

nuerow wrote: post #241
tinus_hn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Firefox accidentally disables these settings or replaced them with new ones with new defaults, deprecates these plugins or introduces a new privacy invasion.

> Until Firefox accidentally disables these settings or replaced them with new ones with new defaults, deprecates these plugins or introduces a new privacy invasion. Did anything of the sort ever happened at all or are we only entertaining thought experiments?

It happens all the time with different OS’, software, games, and apps. I don’t know of a single example of Firefox doing it, but I feel like it’s fair if people are thinking about it as a possibility.

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

#246

Post by squarefoot »

st3fan wrote: post #194
criddell wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?

We use the telemetry data as input to many product and business decisions. It is very important.

If that was entirely true, then better communication with users would probably be the ideal substitute for it.

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

#247

Post by ameminator »

tokai wrote: post #32
ameminator wrote: post #24

When I heard about all these shenanigans over at Firefox, I switched to Vivaldi, and I am enjoying the experience so far

Its not free or open software, so using it is a step back.

Well, I have serious issues with most of the major open-source browsers. I liked Opera when it was around, I heard good things about Vivaldi and I'm willing to trust them more than Firefox and Chrome at this point. I wish it wasn't this way and I would have preferred open source or even paying hard cash for a good browser experience, but I will take a good browser experience from a source that is at least transparent about their funding and is not Google or funded by Google.

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

#248

Post by todoslostacos »

dont__panic wrote: post #196
duskwuff wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Some of us are responsible software owners who prefer to update on our own terms. I understand the argument that my grandmother should probably enable auto-updates, because otherwise she could easily end up months behind on releases. But I care deeply about my personal computing environment. I notice every minuscule change because I'm on my computer for hours and hours each day. Sometimes I'm in the middle of some im…

(Disclaimer: I work on the Firefox Application Update system)

> But let me opt out

It seems to me that you can opt out. You can use the "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" setting in `about:preferences`. Or you can use the exact policy currently under discussion: `DisableAppUpdate`. Or there is another policy called `ManualAppUpdateOnly` [0].

> (Mozilla, are you listening?)

Why yes, we are listening. We have heard many people request the ability to disable automatic updates, which is why we have the options that I mentioned above. If you feel that these options don't meet your needs, we would really appreciate you filing a bug [1]. We will get to it fastest if you put it in the correct component (which for this issue is `Toolkit::Application Update`).

> for the love of god please don't override my preferences back to automatic updates when you decide to change the UI of preferences.

I'm guessing that you are referring to when we removed the "Never install updates" setting [2]? This wasn't fundamentally a UI change. We had several good reasons to remove the underlying pref. Naturally, that meant that the UI for that pref went away as well. I won't spend a lot of time getting into our reasoning here, but we would be happy to discuss it with you if you want to chat with us about it. You can find us in the `#install-update:mozilla.org` channel on https://chat.mozilla.org

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/#manualappupdate... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420514

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

#249

Post by ahtaarra »

programmarchy wrote: post #46

Maybe I’m missing something but it looks like there aren’t actually code changes, rather a repackage with a strict policy file: https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/settings/-/blob/maste... I was wondering how they could instantly patch nightly builds and this seems to be the approach. Good idea and nice to have a build pipeline that allows tweaking Firefox to this degree.

Their patches can be found here: https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/common/-/tree...

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

#250

Post by mdaniel »

alexmcc81 wrote: post #156
geofft wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd like to see is a Firefox (and Chromium) fork with - automatic builds and uploads via GitHub/GitLab CI (or similar) from a well-commented build script - all the knobs for reproducible builds set up, so anyone can fork the repo, run the CI themselves, and see that it's bit-for-bit the same thing - an automatic merge or rebase of the latest stable release tag, and the result of that merge being plugged into aut…

I see Brave are interested [1] in reproducible builds but it's not implemented yet. [2] I'm not sure if their CI artifacts are public or not. [1] https://brave.com/building-brave/ [2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5830

This is relevant to my interests (less the reproducible builds part, but very much the "well commented CI script" part), and for a frame of reference I have successfully built the last couple of brave tags because I'm persistent that way. But I haven't put it in my CI yet because they appear to clone *the whole chromium* repo courtesy of depot_tools & gclient, making the caching story very bad as that git repo is twenty two gigs (not the checkout, mind you, I mean the git repo)

Plus, the build takes several hours on my Ubuntu machine, so unknown what the CI job timeout is or how beefy the runners need to be in order to not OOM a monster C++ linker

I want to be careful with this commentary, because it's just my opinion as an outsider, and ultimately it's their project. But I struggle mightily with the decision tree that lead one to have a home grown build system written in npm that shells out to depot_tools, gclient, a bunch of manual git clones (although there are some git submodules, too), then a ... fascinating ... manual patching system layered on top of it all. I'm glad it works for them, but it makes wading in by the casual user incredibly hard.

Compare that to mozbuild (and its new "mach" friend) that as very best I can tell is python all the way down and since their CI system is also open source, one can very easily crib enough config files to build it locally

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