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...
How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?
LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
171–180 of 310 posts
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#172Earlier 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?
This is exactly the sort of thing one might expect an extension to be able to to, but since the move to web-extensions many of these things aren't possible.
For example, you can't change user settings from an extension. Or install other extensions.
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Brave Company trying to make money off of its fork. > Vivaldi Company trying to ??? > Edge Microsoft, who found that maintaining a chrome fork would be less expensive than playing catch-up with their own in-house browser .
And yet the all could have choose Firefox and you could say exactly the same.
Chromium has proper separation of its components (Blink, V8, Desktop, iOS, Android UIs, etc). It's "easier" for a small full-time paid team to detach the default browser UI, implement their own thing and keep the other components up to date.
Examples of this are the Electron Framework [0], Vivaldi, Brave, Opera, Yandex, Edge, etc.
Firefox instead is a nightmare to fork. They used to have something called XulRunner[1] that allowed to create your own XUL application (things like Seamonkey, Thunderbird used it) thus making it fairly easy to fork Firefox. After the 41 release Mozilla removed it completely. XulRunner's components were intertwined with Firefox code. Mozilla deliberately killed the easiest way to work their product.
Only light forks like Waterfox, LibreWolf are viable. Hard forks fail or struggle every single time Mozilla releases a new version (SeaMonkey, Waterfox Classic, Pale Moon, etc), lagging behind in features and performance.
Even WebKit is easier to integrate with your own UI (Safari, Gnome Web [2], etc).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#174LibreWolf 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?
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#175Author 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...
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 part of the time.
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#176Earlier 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.
It depends on how they plan to diverge from upstream firefox. Given enough source code changes a fork might be justifiable.
I don’t think “hard forking” a browser of all things is manageable, even for largish companies, let alone a few developer team. Backporting all the security patches is a very expensive process.
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just trace it’s network activity without a code audit.
Doesn’t help if the exfiltration only occurs monthly and you only monitored for a week, or if there’s something locally malicious, or if side channels are involved, or if it’s manipulating data sent to legitimate sites (e.g. instructions to your bank, while logged in as you).
Keep it on, you can keep a firewall on, locally malicious files can be seen on your machine and if they aren't transmitted what is the worry?
If its manipulating data sent to legitimate sites you'd notice while you used it. These concerns aren't absent in other official browsers either.
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#178Earlier 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.
The problem is not the exec getting paid this much. It is about getting paid this much when to me and many long time users like me see a sinking ship with ever decreasing user base... while on the brink of no more pay from Google... Trying to push ads to us.
The context is important. It's like when your house is on fire and you are casually using the fire to light up a cigar.
> I sincerely apologize that Mozilla isn't up to the pristine standards of the big technology companies. /s
In all seriousness, we just need the heart of the old MoCo (Pre quantum) and the tech of the current MoCo. ;)
Firefox users are ideologically invested in the browser. I do feel like Mozilla is trying to push things like you are this big corp (In a way MoCo is.). While I am absolutely happy with the technical progress and direction Firefox taking, MoFo/MoCo should understand the ideological element here. This is why you see more outcry against "how things should be run" against Mozilla and not Google.
Re: LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom
#179Once 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 ha…
I feel the same as you. It is great that there is another variants at the same time, we already have more than 6 FF variants and they are behind with security patches and updates. I recalled that WaterFox and Pale Moon are quite of versions behind Firefox. Would be nice to have a FF variant that are capable to be equal as Firefox like Chrome, Brave & Vivaldi. For Firefox variant, I couldn't think of variant that coul…
Something like Vivaldi but using FF as a base would be _wonderful_.