19h ago

LibreWolf's defaults are too strict and slow down adoption

I believe LibreWolf's defaults are too strict and slow down adoption. Most options are either : all or nothing. No in-between.

Sadly, I believe the default settings are too strict and will slow down adoption by the mass, which would in term bring a better anonymity set.

It's not a great alternative to Firefox because LibreWolf is just not usable for the daily user: no DRM, no cookies, no history, websites that break... The browser should let the user choose:

Maximum compatibility (more tracking)
Mid-option (like a modded firefox but without the annoyances like cookies not being stored, having a fixed size, or forced light-mode/timezone)
Best privacy (pretty much the current mode)

I find myself forced to edit the default settings which is a huge privacy/fingerprinting risk. If we create 'settings groups', yes, the privacy will be hurt, but at least we will be more in each group.

What do you think about this?

26 comments

It's specifically forked to be the most privacy respecting non-Tor browser out there. The extreme privacy is the point of it. I'm not sure what it is you want but its not LW - and thats fine, use another fork instead.
- Any to recommend? :)
  
  Not to recommend as I don't use them (I use LW and Mullvad - and Ironfox on mobile - all of which might give you the same issues you have with LW) but I've heard people mention Mercury, Floorp and Waterfox as being good privacy focused alternatives.

I think you're missing the point of this browser. This is not a browser designed for masses.

Librewolf's defaults are sane. Masses don't care about privacy anyway, they just use Chrome.
- I care about privacy but think librewolf's default are too strict. I know other people that would think the same.

Counterpoint: LibreWolf's defaults are one of its main selling points.
- Then it'll never truly rise, if it's for really a really small niche
  
  Yep. It doesn’t even have auto updates so unless you actively use a package manager, people are likely going to miss security updates anyway.
  I don’t think it’s meant to be a mass adoption browser. It fills a niche and it fills it pretty well.
  
  Not everything is meant to. It was made for a specific purpose and works for that purpose.
  It seems to be doing just fine to me.

I don’t care about adoption line go up, and I agree with Mozilla’s founder that adding DRM to Firefox was Mozilla’s original sin.
- At the end of the day, I just want a better for privacy browser than Firefox and Brave, without having to fight with it so it works the way I want it to
  The defaults and strict options just makes me feel like it's not a user-friendly browser and not one that let me have the browser I want to use, but rather someone else's vision of the browser
  
  Yes, it is someone else’s vision of a browser, and evidently wasn’t made for users like you. As the saying goes, what do you want for nothing, your money back?

You know... Firefox is also still there.
- I know, but it has tracking and data collection by default. Having a Firefox fork without that by default could be good
  
  Does it really?
  So far all the freakout has been due to changes to its terms of service. There's been no changes to the codebase that add any data collection.

I don't think privacy related browsers will ever really become mainstream. The closest we have is probably Brave, and more people honestly use that because of hype and adblocking still working post manifest v3 on it while still being chromium based.
I'm honestly very happy with Librewolf, but then again I default to browsing the web with JS turned off, so I'm definitely not anyone's target audience.

LibreWolf works fine for me with the defaults on many websites. If I want to browse a website that uses DRM or has other privacy-hostile mitigations, I can use another browser. It's not like I'm locked down to one option.
And I'm pretty sure LibreWolf does save history. As for cookies, you can keep them fairly easily. This is all in the options panel, which is very minimal and compact just like Firefox.
I do like your suggestion of settings groups even if it does increase the fingerprinting surface potentially, but I'm afraid the LibreWolf team is already struggling to keep pace. I'm sure if an issue/pull request was started they would consider implementing this.
Perhaps for fingerprinting purposes, you could even have site-specific configurations for everything besides DRM, but I'm unsure if that would be easy to implement.

That's why I use Waterfox as my main browser and LibreWolf as my secondary for quick searches and things I want to be separated.
- Seems nice, but them using Bing and getting paid for it is... a bit counter intuitive... no tracking, except if it gives us a bit of money
  A bit like firefox... oh well
  
  Why don’t you create the exact browser you want, publish it, and then listen to people like you complain that it’s not the exact browser they want? 😂 Seriously, it takes like a few seconds to tweak the user settings w/r/t search engines.
  
  Yeah I removed that immediately. Most browsers and forks make their money through search engine partnerships, sadly.
  
  You can change the default search engine in less than five clicks. You're going to be installing the addons you need anyway (uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger at bare minimum).

26 comments