Author of Mozilla telemetry here. You can accomplish this with official firefox by blacklisting incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org domain, per <a href="https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=telemetry.mozilla&path=cpp&case=false&regexp=false" rel="nofollow">https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=telemetry.moz...</a>
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/, so this gives you nothing except lagging security updates from an unknown developer.
LibreWolf 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.<p>Doing all that on stock Firefox is a lot of work which is why I prefer the developers of LibreWolf to do it for me. Call me lazy if you want.<p>There is the added benefit of new Firefox features getting stripped in later releases of LibreWolf that otherwise would have gone un-noticed by me. Also: Trimming down the browser traffic and stopping it from being really chatty with Mozilla servers is great (if you don't like Mozilla for whatever reason).
Once 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?<p>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 has millions of lines of code in multiple languages with a history going back 2 decades. I can't find:<p>- who is responsible for the project security<p>- their CVE policies<p>- policies for back porting Firefox patches etc<p>- update schedules<p>They also removed the auto-updater which is critical to ensuring browsers get the latest patches.<p>I'm really skeptical about the (undocumented) "hundreds of privacy/security/performance settings and patches" they claim to have implemented. What exactly cannot be achieved through settings and addons?
Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?
This brings up the questions: How can i disable as much telemetry as possible when using the standard Firefox?<p>What am i missing if i go to <i><about:config></i>, search for "telemetry" and set everything to <i>false</i>?<p>Are there drawbacks to blocking the hostname <i>incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org</i> in Pi-hole?
So my choice is to trust one of either:<p>1. The Mozilla developers who are capturing telemetry, but probably just using it to push ads (at worst, and possibly not even that).<p>2. Some new devs who may have good intentions, but who are unknown to me, who are not capturing telemetry, but nevertheless have control over my browser.
It might make more sense to have no ads and for telemetry to be opt in. I actually want FF having my telemetric data as far as it is used for improving the product only. Ready to pay if they were into it.
> [ Debian-based ]<p>> This is for Debian Unstable only - do not try to install this package on any other branch of Debian or Ubuntu/Mint..<p>When I see a <i>"Debian based"</i> installer, I would expect it to work on at least some type of OS apart from <i>Debian</i>. That header should really say - Debian Unstable installer, not a "Debian based" installer.
Maybe I’m missing something but it looks like there aren’t actually code changes, rather a repackage with a strict policy file:<p><a href="https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/settings/-/blob/master/distribution/policies.json" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/settings/-/blob/maste...</a><p>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.
Genuine questions. Aren't such forks harming the actual Firefox developers by decreasing the Firefox user base? Doesn't it help the Google monopoly on the web?
I made a fork, of Firefox, just to remove Pocket. That part was easy-ish. Maintaining it is difficult, cause code changes a lot. Building FF doesn't take long (Gentoo, 8 cores, 64G RAM). I wish I knew more about code so I could fix the rendering issues. I'd love to see FF the core of some apps, like Chromium. I tried that with Servo but, I don't know enough (and it keeps freezing up)
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.<p>Basic browsing may work, but nothing remotely close to “web-app” will, because they disabled all modern APIs due to privacy concerns.
One factor that is important to me when comparing browsers is resource consumption. I don't like it when my fans spin.<p>I wonder if the "time" tool that comes with Linux is a good way to quantify it? When I do "time firefox reddit.com", wait until the page is fully rendered (including the ads) and close the browser, I get:<p><pre><code> time firefox reddit.com
real 0m13,089s
user 0m9,411s
sys 0m2,882s
</code></pre>
Does that mean that Firefox used about 12s of CPU time to render the frontpage of Reddit? (I guess user+sys is the amount that counts)<p>"time firefox news.ycombinator.com" gives me about 7 seconds.
I recently looked at the changes they make to the default preferences and so many are nothing to do with privacy, and some of those that are also reduce the user's safety (e.g. disabling Google Safebrowsing). I'd advise any prospective users to comb over the changes very carefully before using it.
Concerning Firefox-type forks, <a href="https://cliqz.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cliqz.com/</a> (RIP) seems relevant. At least Brave has taken on the search engine.
LibreWolf is a pretty good firefox fork, But i would always use firefox with tweaks and user.js. Don't trust forks much, As i rather put my data with firefox plus mullvad vpn works with them on their vpn service. And mullvad is a really good privacy vpn...
anything new here? it's not new<p>Some discussion about it maybe a year ago and it dwindled off as barely any changes to Firefox except branding....