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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

#281

Post by caslon »

md8z wrote: post #218
caslon wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unfortunately, a certain employee who was rightfully kicked out of Mozilla in 2014 made a few bets that paid off (users dislike ads, users are stupid and will love it if you offer them money, and they'll go crazy for security snake oil even if it actively harms them).

Firefox doesn't block ads because they're funded by Google and they have ads in their own browser. Nobody likes ads. Especially not in the browser. This contributes to the decline. Firefox doesn't advertise with security snake oil, and they beg for money a lot, which is the exact opposite of the model proposed by the only browser that's rapidly shot up in market share in the last decade rather than roughly stagnating.

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

#282

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #273
kaba0 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but if you think that disabling auto-updates on goddamn browsers, then you may not be as technical a user as you think of yourself. Browsers run untrusted code 0-24, which get JIT compiled to machine code through a very complex and bug-prone process. Add to that that desktop OSs are quite lacking when it comes to sandboxes, so even with browser sandboxes, the potential for serious damage is quire hard. So,…

Junkies snort, sniff, drink, eat, inject untested stuff all the times, which get's metabolized to hot shit, frying their neurons, trying their livers, trough a very complex and bug-prone process with the occassional OD. Add to that that rational thought is quite lacking when it comes to judgement. So, stopping to be a junkie is must. edit: Blablala Didn't you get the analogy? If your'e using software equivalent to th…

Yeah bitches, light up the pipe some more!

Enjoy your fever dreams, where it is considered normal to build skyscrapers on a foundation of a house of cards,

which requires constant maintenance by an army of people equal only to the builders of the pyramids.

Make Work! Make Work!

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

#283

Post by floatingatoll »

joshspankit wrote: post #243
floatingatoll wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a chasm of difference between "We've identified something you have not given consideration to" as you describe (which I wholeheartedly support), and "We will insist we're right about the same points over and over again in every post about Firefox for all time" as HN behaves (which I do not, no matter what the topic). The former is a valuable and essential component of public issue reporting; the latter is not.

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

#285

Post by musicale »

Communitivity wrote: post #84
mgbmtl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…

I don't mind telemetry, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.

I don't mind it if it's opt-in with a user-facing setting to turn it on or off.

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

#286

Post by musicale »

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.

> they disabled all modern APIs due to privacy concerns

Interesting - perhaps some of those APIs were not designed with privacy in mind.

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

#287

Post by junon »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #278
junon wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having control over which information about yourself, your life, your habits, etc. you choose to give out, when, for how long, and to whom. It's not this convoluted. Give people their privacy.

I’m not anti privacy, it just means something different to everyone. If you don’t control the metadata for servers you use, does that mean you cannot ever expect privacy? I argued with someone about how we shouldn’t expect privacy with a cell phone, I don’t see how a 24/7 location tracking device that reads data telemetry (even if you use a custom privacy rom you connect to the towers and send telemetry) can ever be…

Not having to use servers at all is kind of a preference. Why do browsers need to phone home at all?

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

#288

Post by GhettoComputers »

junon wrote: post #287
GhettoComputers wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not anti privacy, it just means something different to everyone. If you don’t control the metadata for servers you use, does that mean you cannot ever expect privacy? I argued with someone about how we shouldn’t expect privacy with a cell phone, I don’t see how a 24/7 location tracking device that reads data telemetry (even if you use a custom privacy rom you connect to the towers and send telemetry) can ever be…

Not having to use servers at all is kind of a preference. Why do browsers need to phone home at all?

When you use a site, you’re using servers and they have logs. This is unrelated to the browser itself, although ideally it shouldn’t have telemetry. But even so the servers of sites you use will and you can’t control the data collection.

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

#289

Post by aabbcc1241 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #252
nuerow wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Telemetry isn't inherently bad or privacy violating. How can you tell?

In Firefox: point your url bar to about:telemetry It shows you all the data that has been gathered. (Though IIRC it might still show stuff even when you've disabled telemetry -- in that case the data is being aggregated locally but not sent.) Go to https://telemetry.mozilla.org To look at the data on the server side. There are more sophisticated ways of querying it, but obviously not everybody can just be handed acce…

Just checked about:telemetry, it seems most data are about CPU and memory stats, nothing related to browsing history.

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

#290

Post by GhettoComputers »

floatingatoll wrote: post #283
joshspankit wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a chasm of difference between "We've identified something you have not given consideration to" as you describe (which I wholeheartedly support), and "We will insist we're right about the same points over and over again in every post about Firefox for all time" as HN behaves (which I do not, no matter what the topic). The former is a valuable and essential component of public issue reporting; the latter is no…

I see Firefox doing user hostile activity all the time, so I’m more inclined to think that are using telemetry in the slowly boiling frog analogy. The extension download data even without telemetry shows people want multi row tabs but they’re not putting it in by default. I am not sure how much the data is being used to improve user experience.
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