this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Firefox FTW!
LibreWolf
Is there anything better about LibreWolf that can’t be achieved by altering Firefox settings?
It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.
Firefox doesn't invade anyone's privacy.
Sadly, with default settings that’s the case. Partly due to Telemetry being active and Google being the default search engine.
Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it's pretty well anonymized. It's also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.
You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing. I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.
I have informed myself. There is nothing personally-identifiable in the data Mozilla collects in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
You seem to ignore information collected about you is collected information about you.
This seems like and IS personally identifiable information….
What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? I'm not saying they aren't there, it's just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think we're going to far.
There's a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it's a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Why then not use Chrome if you are fine with Google?!
Chromium is deprecating manifest v2 and the newer v3 has neutered ad blocking capabilities. In Alphabet's SEC fillings they list ad blocking as a challenge to their revenue. End users can't just flip v2 back on (unless the devs of their browser put work to let them). End users can change their default search engine though. Very easily. Trivially so. Who knows, maybe as a result of that court ruling we'll see browsers forced to have no default search engine in the future. I think that's better, yes, but I really don't think having Google Search as the default is that massive of a concern compared to much of the other shit they're doing.
I guess, this is most of the changes they do: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/
There's maybe a handful where I'm not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where it's technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There's not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting
extensions.pocket.enabledtofalse.I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, there's also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.
Yes, but only begrudgingly.
(edit) oh no, I've said something bad about the lesser evil, and the people who have made it their identity to violently cum all over the first thing that isn't owned by Google are after me. I hope the pipe bomb hitman is at least polite.
Nah, Firefox is way better.
I just wish Firefox updates weren't so intrusive. Having it hit me with "Firefox updated in the background, restart to continue using Firefox" while I'm trying to use QuickBooks for my job is so disruptive when QuickBooks doesn't save automatically and never opens back up to where I left it off. I won't go back to Chrome, but I never had it pull that sort of forced restart on me.
You can disable that. I have mine set to notify me when updates are available
Amazing, I'll give that a shot
I’m happy that they give an option but goddamn would it kill them to have the safe option as the default for once?
There are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think it's far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.
Or batch update some of your apps with Patch My PC Home Updater
Looks like it didn't work unfortunately 😞 Thank you for the suggestion though!
From what I understand, Chrome doesn't need to do this, because when you close it, it keeps running in the background and does its upgrades then, which is also pretty intrusive.
If you're updating Firefox via the built-in auto-updater, you can tell it in the settings that it should only install updates when you tell it to do so.
Ah. I guess I don't notice that since I'm on Linux and just update Firefox whenever I want.
If you go to Hamburger menu > Settings > General > Check for updates but let you choose to install them, you won't auto update anymore. I agree that would be annoying.
Thanks! I had no idea this setting existed and it will make Firefox so much more practical for me to use.
Restart Firefox to let it finish updating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a screen that says you HAVE to restart right now at this very moment.
When it happens, it doesn't let me do anything other than stay on the already loaded webpage without restarting.
Open a new tab > "Restart to continue..."
Click a link > "Restart to continue..."
Type a URL > "Restart to continue..."
and etc
What OS? I almost never close out of Firefox on my Macs at home and I've never seen that message there. FF on Windows seems to be the same. It's been ages though since I've left FF open for months on end on Linux though.
I've had this same experience on Linux Mint. I'll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won't load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.
I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I'm like, "Dangit, didn't realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox."
Windows 10
Same on MacOS
They said at work, perhaps it is a corporate thingy that forces them to be on the mandated version.
I got it again unfortunately, here's a screenshot of what it looks like
I found this. https://superuser.com/questions/1451210/how-can-i-make-firefox-stop-forcing-me-to-restart-my-browser
You say it's windows, but I think you said it's a work machine so maybe they're updating firefox from under you?
It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it's not really a surprise.
I wish this blanket statement were true. Firefox is better in some respects, but surely not all. Tab and session management - just to name two examples - are just handled better by the Chromium crowd, as much as it pains me to say that.
That said, I still use Firefox in most cases.
Different profiles on Firefox are nowhere near Chrome.
I'm still going to use FF, but there are areas it lags behind Chrome. That's the only big one for me.
Naturally, the browser that receives way less funding has less Dev work available.
Same... I know it's better and worth supporting, I just don't like using it for some reason.
Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and it's now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though...
Yeah any other alternatives? There’s arc, but I think that’s just chromium underneath (see above, meme)
There's ladybird and servo, but neither are near a release and ladybird won't even have an alpha til 2026.
And to make matters more complicated,
I really want there to be more options in the browser market that aren't Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situation's tough.
I'm an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.
The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable "sponsored bookmarks" upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for search...
All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.
Sure the enshittification isn't anywhere near the pace as Chrome but it's happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.
Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.
You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefox's AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I don't need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.
Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.
There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you don't want it.
I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.