LibreWolf Browser
28 points by linkdd
28 points by linkdd
I’ve been using it for a few months now; seems like a good firefox replacement.
There are a couple really bad defaults tho; their “resist fingerprinting” setting makes it so that your page zoom settings are thrown out every time you close the tab, and all your cookies are erased every time you close the browser. So it does need a little tweaking before it’s usable, but I’d rather be turning off unwanted pro-privacy features than unwanted advertising features.
The best cookie policy I’ve seen, and the one I wish every browser would copy, was the Self Destructing Cookies plugin for Firefox.
Whenever you navigated away from a page (including closing a tab) it would move your cookies somewhere else. Next time you visit the site, the browser wouldn’t see them, but there was an option to restore them. They also gave some visual hints (cookies deleted, cookies available for restore).
99% of the time, this required no user interaction. I don’t want any site I visit to track me. Let them leave whatever cookies they want during the season and they’re gone at the end.
But sometimes I do. And for these there was the restore option. If it’s a site where I log in, I hit one button, the cookies were restored and the page refreshed. Another button and that became the default setting for the site. An online shop I visited once, left something in the basket, and returned to? Just restore the cookies once unless I create an account. A site I use regularly and have an account on? Keep the cookies. A site I visited twice randomly? No cookies for you!
The really important thing in their implementation (which got lost in a bunch of clones) was the undo feature. I don’t know if I want a site to keep cookies until I return and something stops working. If you make me choose on the first visit, I will be constantly frustrated by making the wrong choice (or I’ll always store them). Soft deleting with a restore option once I see something is broken on the next visit is great,
Let me start with I’m incredibly grateful for the work they’ve done to make this browser available and it’s also my daily browser.
But yeah, had to tweak it hard to act like the type of browser you’d want to use on a normal basis. It would be great if you could set a “privacy profile” when you start the browser and get a more reasonable set of defaults.
I get the distinct impression that it’s not “for” people like you and me. They made a browser for hardcore privacy enthusiasts; like the kind of people who will only barely accept the idea of not using Tor Browser for everything. Then Mozilla started shooting itself in the foot, and suddenly normal Firefox users are looking for a liferaft and hopping on Librewolf, and as you can imagine, it’s disorienting.
Thirded (kinda) - having to manually add passwords to saved passwords instead of the (broken but existing) “save password” dialog is a bit annoying, otherwise it’s fine (except webgl, haven’t looked into it yet)
The only issue I had with librewolf is it’s default strategy is too strict: history is deleted on quit by default, no site data ever stored. After setting up firefox sync with librewolf, I lost all my browser history for years.
After setting up firefox sync with librewolf, I lost all my browser history for years.
Oof, that’s gotta suck! I had a similar experience with StumbleUpon.
I used to use Firefox as my main browser and maintained that for a bit when I first migrated to OS X. I had thousands of links liked in my SU account, but I stopped using it after switching to Safari as my main browser. Safari didn’t have an SU extension, but I always held out hope they’d port it and in the meantime, I’d use Firefox only for stumbling.
Long story short, it never really happened, I used Firefox less and less, and even tried stumbling on the website directly, but it just wasn’t the same, there were some quirks with it so I just sopped. Years later, I tried logging in to my SU account, and apparently, it had been bought by some other company. I contacted their support, was told I had to migrate my account with zero suggestion that my data was gone. Man, that pissed me off!
The dangling the false hope to get me to sign up more than my data all disappearing. Then I searched my email archives and I found no announcement email, so that annoyed me more.
“No worries”, I thought, “I’ll just export my Firefox bookmarks”, since the extension used to save the links within Firefox bookmarks, too, in a special folder. Nope, all gone (despite, AFAIR, seeing that folder all the time in my Firefox bookmarks)! I reckon I must still have the bookmarks in some old Firefox profile backup somewhere, but I haven’t gotten around to checking, so I’m in this limbo state where I don’t know if I’ve lost all that data yet.
I like LibreWolf, and use it semi-regularly. Did something in particular inspire you to share the link here today?
I discovered it today, I was told it was a “de-mozilla’d browser” which made me chuckle. And I thought it would be nice to share it. That’s all :)
Nice! (And I didn’t mean to sound like I was discouraging that… I was mostly wondering if there was some precipitating “anti-mozilla” event that I’d missed.)
It’s a very pleasant browser to use, and I hope those who discover it from your post enjoy it similarly.
I switched to LibreWolf a few months ago, like many others here, and found it delightful. I did have to change a few settings to be less strict, but I will gladly do that. Feels much better than trying to hunt down yet another privacy-invasive knob to turn off after an upgrade.
And as an added bonus: They’re on Codeberg, rather than GitHub! I love that. I’m unlikely to contribute in any way, but the knowledge that my browser is on Codeberg is a nice feeling.
Although I have not used LibreWolf yet (I’m currently enjoying WaterFox, but feel free to comment on the choice), I think it should be clear that all of these projects will go away if Mozilla can’t continue funding Firefox development. Web browser feature development is advancing at a pace that is way too high to compete with Google/Chrome without adequate funding.
I would personally prefer the pace to slow down and multiple browser engines being able to compete again, but I don’t believe that will happen. Maybe a tech-sovereignty-driven Browser fund is a more realistic option (who would steer development though?), looking at you, EU.
Absolutely right.
I use Waterfox on Linux, because of UI reasons that I’ve not seen anyone else even mention:
Waterfox works fine with global menu bars. No other Firefox version I’ve seen still does.
But if Mozilla dies we’ll be left with a decaying corpse.
I switched definitely to Librewolf when I realized that it was defaulting to the settings I was using to painfully configure on each Firefox install (removing ads, removing google/ebay, …)
Also, it doesn’t save cookies by default, which means that I need to click on the little lock to add one site to those for which I want to save cookies.
It’s nearly perfect!
The only problem I have with LibreWolf is that I can’t switch color themes when I turn on Resist Fingerprinting. The ability to switch color themes is extremely important to me and I don’t like how it’s bundled with other privacy features there.
That’s by design since prefers-color-scheme can be (ab)used for fingerprinting and/or deanonymisation.
Only solution I can think of, which is definitely painful: turn off Resist Fingerprinting, and manually change flags+settings to match what Resist Fingerprinting would do, except the color theme stuff.
(Sorry, not super helpful, I know)
It sucks, but it is worth it—you get used to it & appreciate the sites that allow manual theme selection. Really there should be more to prefers than just light & dark anyhow.
you get used to it & appreciate the sites that allow manual theme selection
On some websites, sure, but a whole lot of websites just pick a theme in their CSS based on a prefers-color-scheme media query with no override.
I am aware, and yes that is exactly what I did.
I think it’s less of an abuse vector for me since I disable JS
You can abuse it without the use of JS.
prefers-color-scheme I was talking about is CSS-based, @media queries and such.
For example:
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
body { background-image: url("/dark.png") }
}
Then i just watch my server logs to see what IP is hitting /dark.png and that can be correlated with other factors to deanonymise a user/users.
No JS required :)
See “How might Resist Fingerprinting break web pages?” on support.mozilla.org. There’s a lot more that people are often times surprised with
The ability to switch color themes is extremely important to me
Why?
I am just curious. I think I’ve been actively using the WWW for 30 years this year and I have never once wanted to do that.
Not the op but if you’re e.g. logged in to something like Discord in 2 browser tabs, to me it makes sense to have one in light mode and one in dark mode (ignoring OS settings)