I was preparing to mention LibreWolf. I think it becomes more and more of a better choice. I’ll probably move to it too. Thankfully there are both Windows executables, Chocolatey packages, Flatpaks and AppImages and it’s available in some repos.
LibreWolf is basically what Firefox markets itself as.
I don’t think Brave is that bad. The worst thing they did by popular opinion was to inject their own offer codes in URLs when people visited certain websites. The second worse was suggesting people websites to use (basically in-browser ads). Moz://a is doing the same privacy stuff as Brave, IMO arguably even worse than Brave, especially the Firefox experiments and now the suggestions which go to Moz://a when you even see them + obviously when you click on them. Neither of them have an opt-in model to telemetry.
Honestly I think a lot of people reach and strawman as hard as possible because they hate who develops its base… chromium… = Google = bad no matter what to most people.
absolutely yes… you nailed it. IDK why @The_DM_Barlow et al cant understand that what Mozilla has done is much worse. Much more egregious
this has to be the most retarded af feature to disable
Thanks for actually posting evidence for this claim.
Where did you cite your sources or evidence? All you did was claim this and claim that and it seems you don’t even care at the end of it now? wtf? Sorry dude, but Brave is NOT a privacy browser. Firefox is the closest thing we have atm to a free and open source browser. Their latest developments are only to stay relevant in the “market”
I was referring to the document I watched. Simply was just echoing what the narratar said, which I guess was their, or his/her perspective.
I was thinking this. The thought that default settings will be already set for your expectations is unrealistic anyway. I recall when I first learned that you can’t just install a program, but you also have to configure it properly.
I want to see the evidence that this is the case. Not to be a dick but I see a lot of baseless claims being tossed around and not a lot of links to articles disclosing the details. If Firefox is “betraying” their customers, then I demand you cite the sources for this evidence. That is all I have to say about Firefox, that and TOR is based on FF… which is one of the most secure browsers to use if configured correctly. IDK who would “trust” a company anyway, as if you could give them your wife, kids, $, car, retirement. ESPECIALLY one like Google, a Lifelog affiliate. Everyone is here using Lifelog products thinking they are different somehow, when they mostly are all the same, come in the same basket of blobware… came from the same dev ideal that data is a commodity.
unblockable Google Analytics on addons page - ghacks article
Firefox Suggest (the online components)
DoH Cloudflare (I think this is enabled by default for many/all users; my concern is the centralisation of DNS query information, but this is less concerning than most others on this list)
Though I stay on ESR, so I could very well be missing any new “features” that were only ever tested on the main branch.
I personally also disable the keyword.enabled setting, to prevent unexpected sharing of domains with Google or whatever is set as the Internet Keywords URL, but Internet Keywords is not a new system at all. Actually, recent changes may have replaced the Internet Keywords system, but I have not thoroughly looked into that yet.
I can see the reason for concern and I was unaware of a few things listed here. I appreciate that! That being said, this thread did lead me to a new product I was unaware of, Librewolf. I checked into this and I see that it’s basically Firefox but properly configured, including a few extensions that everyone should already be using, and the kicker - the few selling points they market this around. They actually removed the “phone home” feature. I have already installed it and am checking it out now.
I can see the transitions over time, from the 90’s to what we have now, in the corporate world - to the intel community as well. I see mainstream companies, whom have hundreds of millions of subscribers, taking advantage of the hidden aspects of convenience. This is a product, heck, what I am saying here is, it is an industry. A for profit institution now, where we are the product and are actively being exploited. The more privacy and security based products coming out, open source, encrypted, etc, the more this institution will seek to break, challenge, and exploit them.
I am glad to have come by this thread. As I am learning to better my digital self, like all of you here, I genuinely feel we deserve better. So I see for the rest of my day, I will be searching on Librefox and all that surrounds this.
If I walk up to a polar bear I’m fully expecting it wanting to eat me at some point or wreck my shit and that was probably a dumb decision So that’s what is akin to running a chrome-based browser.
However do we firefox’s behaving is like that friend that’s been your friend for so long that you don’t expect them to stab you in the back and they just do that In addition to that they justify it saying that somehow they were absolutely correct that it’s the only way forward
If you are argument is for them to stay in the market which I read above. Then you’re no better than them and they’re really not the only option. In this case I would employ the enemy of my enemy might be my friend at least temporarily.
For them to do such a betrayal of trust makes them less trustworthy than the chrome-based browsers who you already knew was doing it and they don’t exactly deny it. When trust is broken it takes a lot to be earned back and I just don’t feel like they can.
If you ask me to place my faith and trust in you And work hard to earn it and then betray me you are worse than the person who literally said hey don’t trust me I’m probably not a straight arrow
So
Refuser Résister Remplacer
I posted a video about if you can’t find that then that’s on you. They talk about their evidence. They discuss what’s going on and it’s independently verifiable. I won’t spoon feed you it. I also won’t discuss it further it seems very clear that you have your stance and that’s fine and you’re entitled to it no issue there so you’re free to watch the video and verify whatever evidence you need to
Not 100% correct. Safari is technically you only option for iOS. All other browsers are just front ends for its engine, apple won’t allow non safari based browsers on the app store.
I was about to post the link to MentalOutlaw’s video on LibreWolf, but Vr234btXx got ahead of me (the LibreWolf Review).
As for the questions:
LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox and the successor to LibreFox with the goal to enhance user privacy by default. Gnu IceCat is a fork of Firefox with the aim to remove proprietary parts from Firefox (like non-free codecs and DRM like widevine)
I am not sure if LibreFox is still maintained, but their model is basically a user profile that you add to Firefox. If Firefox updates, you have to modify your profile again. LibreWolf just outright forked Firefox and are taking care of the removal of privacy invasive anti-features for you, but they remove them entirely. But it does not have any additional code, just removal of code. I was always wary of Firefox forks like SeaMonkey, PaleMoon and WaterFox, because they run behind Firefox by a lot, introduce other hacks to maintain features which might compromise browser security. LibreWolf does not appear to compromise on neither privacy, nor security.
LibreWolf runs just a few days behind Firefox. It’s at version 93, for example the Windows build was released 6 days ago. I expect the other builds to have a similar release date. I believe LibreWolf intends to stay fully upstream, to not repeat the mistakes of PaleMoon and Waterfox. It’s more sustainable, maintainable and it’s less work to just remove features than to try to maintain deprecated features.
EME and DRM, I’m not sure about that. I see no reason not to, because it’s pretty upstream FF. But I can’t confirm that, but from all I know, LibreWolf* doesn’t try to make people use only FOSS / non-proprietary stuff and make you use LibreJS only, unlike IceCat.
I already mentioned patches, it runs just a few days behind and it’s pretty much upstream. No idea about the team’s commitment, they could go do something else at any time, like all community projects. And considering it’s forked from FF stable, I doubt you will see LTS commitment like the ESR versions, coming from LibreWolf. That would be a big overhead to add.
And again, I have not yet used LibreWolf, these are all information that I collected in a while (probably since I first heard about it from MentalOutlaw).
So I’ve been using Librewolf for a little bit just now
Some of these defaults don’t make any sense whatsoever such as shutting off OCSP stapling.
Look I get that certificate authorities we can make an authority of why should we trust them? But as the current security architecture of the worldwide web exists. We need a method to handle the broken certificate revocation system.
It’s an important security measure and it seems they’ve all but disabled even talking to OCSP servers. This will break a server that mandates OCSP stapling like my own self-hosted server with a sectigo SSL certificate and a hardened web server.
Now I was on discord last night and Barlow and I came to the conclusion that yes there could be a possible privacy violation there but it’s neither verified or here nor there.
So why the hell did you do that guys come on?
The other default makes sense from a privacy standpoint but it also breaks a lot of things that I like to use and that is WebGL. They have fourth right disabled any kind of GPU acceleration. I get it but at the same time we have come to rely on that on the internet. I have to products that I use there that need WebGL such as onshape. Come on guys.
With privacy there should always be a balance struck You’re never going to get 100% privacy It’s not going to ever be perfect and it’s only going to get worse going forward You’re just not going to win this fight but at the same time it’s kind of like where do we strike this balance and every single privacy browser goes a little too far. Baseline privacy is okay and ultimately You’re using the internet and that’s a centralized data structure in and of itself. By using it you are inherently giving information out so you shouldn’t be surprised that this is occurring and largely just give out what you don’t mind giving out.
It’s a total mental fallacy to think that you can have 100% privacy or even get close to 70% using the internet as it stands. This comes from basic understanding of the trust system and how web servers work and various other components to what makes the internet go around
Now that being said:
if you are trully serious about privacy. Stop using a cellphone and a computer, disappear from using the internet
That’s the only true way you will achieve any kind of privacy I’m sorry if you don’t like it but hey if you really do care about privacy you should stand on that principle and commit to those actions
absolutely yes… you nailed it. IDK why 
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
flex on poors by building from source in less than a minute. Man I should stream that daily