Librewolf Browser (Firefox Fork)

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

@Foxtrek64

• LibreWolf is a mature FireFox fork with a mission to harden FireFox much in the same way as ArkenFox, but in a way that is approachable by non-technical users. In this sense, it has a similar relationship to FireFox as Brave has to Google Chrome (but without the controversy regarding paid ads).

I feel that this is not really the case, as far as I know LibreWolf only has a handful of contributors. I also don’t really feel it’s been demonstrated that Arkenfox is significantly worse to use.

@Foxtrek64

• LibreWolf has uBlock Origin pre-installed, as recommended by Privacy Guides. If this is undesirable for any reason, it is easy to uninstall this plugin, but I personally feel that this is simply a time saver for people who are just going to install uBO anyways.
• LibreWolf has multiple auto-update options on Windows and Linux. On Linux, it is distributed through the system package manager. On Windows, it is available on Chocolatey and the Windows Store, though the former is strongly preferred over the latter. Should one not wish to auto-update, manually downloading, verifying signatures, and installing updates manually from the website is an option, but I would not recommend it.

macOS? And on Windows I don’t think the existence of third-party package managers like Chocolatey excuse actual automatic update functionality.

@Foxtrek64

All reasons for the browser’s initial rejection except for one have been rectified, and the one remaining reason (weaker sandboxing) did not stop FireFox from being added to Privacy Guides.

Have they though? The main reason (other than automatic updates which is perhaps still an even bigger issue) Librewolf was rejected is:

@jonah

Arkenfox is a collection of modifications you make to your Firefox preferences, but you’re still using Firefox and you’re getting updates (security patches, etc.) directly from Mozilla. With Librewolf you’re waiting for those updates from Mozilla to be merged into Librewolf’s code and released by the Librewolf devs.