I think we’re losing the plot here a bit. The pitch for Mullvad Browser is its Tor browser without Tor. You can use a VPN, preferably Mullvad, and blend in with a crowd and get all the nice anti fingerprinting of Tor browser without dealing with the slow and unreliable Tor network. The pitch for Librewolf is Firefox without some tweaks OOTB. It’s not just Firefox with Arkenfox by the way, they have their own separate stuff. It’s my opinion that’s not enough of a benefit to list it. Essentially if Arkenfox is too hard then you can just stick to tweaking the user-facing settings of Firefox, so imo Firefox itself already fulfills that niche while not having to trust an extra party and getting an update delay however slight.
Could you please give a source to that?
Hey all, I’m on the LibreWolf team, and it’s true that since the departure of @fxbrit the project has taken a total nosedive when it comes to keeping up to date with Arkenfox and settings in general. We’re still making releases, but settings did not get updated.
There are also a bunch of useful tickets that also take my time, I’ve not been able to take the LW settings to the last AF release.I’m mostly a c/rust/vulkan hobby person, not at all good with Browser Security. My first impression is that it’s a total mine field
Sure, I would’ve cited a source, but I thought I’d already shared those quotes earlier in this (very long) thread. Here are a couple of the statements I was referring to:
[Threadpanic] Hey all, I’m on the LibreWolf team, and it’s true that since the departure of fxbrit the project has taken a total nosedive when it comes to keeping up to date with Arkenfox and settings in general.
[Threadpanic] I’m mostly a c/rust/vulkan hobby person, not at all good with Browser Security. My first impression is that it’s a total mine field
[Malte] As threadpanic said, since fxbrit left we have been in a kind of “maintenance” mode in terms of settings. Mainly because we are really only three people left, who all only have varying time to put into the project
One thing I want to make clear is I’m not bringing up these quotes here as a criticism of the LW volunteer maintainers. They are volunteers who are very admirably devoting their free time to a privacy project people find value in. That deserves respect. They are simply stretched thin, and overworked (and possibly lacking in expertise, but that’s not for me to judge).
I respect these people and their contributions to the privacy space and I appreciate their transparency and openness, it shows maturity. But these quotes do highlight a comparative advantage in the simple design model of Arkenfox and disadvantage of small community browser forks like Librewolf. Because Arkenfox is essentially just a ‘list of settings’ that you apply to Firefox using a built in feature of Firefox, the maintenance burden for the maintainer is much lower and simpler.
On a more positive note, Malte also said this in that same discussion:
[Malte] But we have had some discussion in our build chat the last days, and decided on new and more clear responsibilities. I will now take care of maintaining the settings, and will generally put in a bit more time, hopefully doing a similarly good job at some point as fxbrit once did
I personally have no knowledge as to whether Librewolf continued to backslide, stabilized, or has begun to improve in the ~year that has passed since this discussion happened.
I want to sincerely thank you all for taking the time to explain me why my arguments for including LibreWolf in the browser recommendations was mistaken. After reading your points carefully, I realized that I was wrong and that my reasoning was too simplistic.
I truly appreciate the effort you put into this discussion—it helped me understand the deeper considerations I had overlooked. I’ve learned a lot from this thread and I want to correct my position. I was wrong.
Best regards, SYST3M_D3STR0YER
I’d like to offer one more viewpoint as a last pitch
I agree that Brave would be the ideal choice for someone who wants a “just works” setup. However, I have also talked with and heard perspectives from others about why they want to avoid Brave.
To preface, I personally use Brave, but I can see several reasons why someone would avoid wanting to support them. Many people refuse to support Google and the Chromium monopoly. Firefox as an alternative may not be the greatest choice, but choosing to use FF for this reason comes from a place of wanting to enable the lesser evil. Brave works well on Chromium, but several people simply cannot see themselves using it due to being against Google as a whole.
There is also the conversation about Eich’s comments and donations against a group of people. To play devil’s advocate—one could argue that these comments and donations were made a long time ago and no longer affect the day-to-day operations of the browser today. But hearing the voices of the LGBT community makes me think about it more. It makes it extremely hard for anyone or others close to them to want to support someone who could do something as awful as Eich has done. Eich has also never publicly apologized for the comments or donations he made. From their perspective alone, why should they support and use a browser of a man who doesn’t want them to exist and has failed to even give them the courtesy of an apology? I do not want to dive too much into this or condemn people who use the browser every day, but it is something to think about.
I also see that there are several people who want a “just works setup”, but without the bloatware included in Brave. Out of the box, Brave comes with Brave Rewards, Brave Talk, Brave Sync, Brave News, Brave Leo (AI), ads on their initial homepage, and it by default allows web3 connections to be made. I have installed Brave multiple times and it’s about a 5-minute process to turn all of this off. I have even told them that it is easy to turn off, but from the perspective of an individual who literally could care less about any of this, it can be extremely annoying.
If we take a look at LibreWolf, it is very bare-bones when you start. You have a clean homepage and essentially just a search bar. No advertising or anything. It performs the design philosophy of KISS very well. One of the more recent LibreWolf changes automatically disabled Firefox’s AI too (something that you would need to manually update had one used Arkenfox). It is incredibly nice to have sensible defaults without needing to tinker with it out of the box. Brave has some nice additions that I use, but it is much more anxiety-inducing out of the box compared to the very fresh and simple presentation of LW.
I’d also like to add that even as an experienced user who can install Arkenfox with ease or configure Brave in the shortest amount of time—if I open a VM, LibreWolf is the first browser I will install. It is one of the browsers I need to worry about configuring the least. I do not need to worry about disabling unnecessary features, or take time to install the Arkenfox config.
LibreWolf enables RFP by default (which breaks sites), disables WebGL (also breaks functionality for some sites), disables Safe Browsing (combined with the slower updates, terrible for less technical users) and deletes cookies and site data on close, meaning no persistent logins.
Yes, but the difference between this and Arkenfox is that it is much more intuitive to enable and disable in settings. You will also have many who blindly install Arkenfox without reading the docs, and get stuck when a site breaks. Here the settings that may cause breakages in LW are readily available and easy to access.
Resist fingerprinting does indeed lead to breakages, but if we attempt to compare the defaults on LibreWolf versus that of Mullvad Browser, a user would face far more breakages since it’s essentially using Tor’s extremely strong defaults. Even if users enable history, cookies, etc., it will not be as pleasant of an experience to use in contrast to LibreWolf (I personally think letterboxing degrades my browsing experience). On that note about cookies, I believe Brave clears cookies on exit (or they call it forgetful browsing mode—not sure if it works differently) by default too, although I’d agree it is more intuitive to turn on and off.
In conclusion, the way I look at LibreWolf is that it is trying to cater to a variety of people. Those who are fed up with Mozilla, but cannot bring themselves to use a Chromium alternative, and those who still like the idea of Firefox but do not want to waste loads of time on tinkering it to be better. There are many who are also fed up with the amount of bloatware and unneeded things in their browser (even Mullvad has their VPN extension there even if you don’t need it, and it is advised not to remove it because of the potential for increased fingerprinting which feels odd for those who do not care about their vpn). There are also several people who do not like Brave’s reputation/integration with crypto or ever want to use a product of Eich.
I think these are compelling enough reasons that justify recommending LibreWolf for many people who fit into this criteria.
Small correction, but you can actually remove it if you want since the extension doesn’t affect fingerprinting.
Thank you for the correction 
Why? Mullvad Browser does serve an entirely different purpose being fingerprinting protection. But Librewolf also serve an entire different purpose being a turnkey product. They don’t share the same purpose at all.
At one point in this thread, the main reason for disqualifying Librewolf was untimely update.
It ultimately boils down to:
Pro to Arkenfox (con Librewolf): live Firefox updates.
Cons to Arkenfox (pro Librewolf): You have to read through a wiki that is IMO not ELI5 at all. Going through this, is as painful as going through the Windows 11 Group Policies and takes a lot of time.
This is not a mild convenience though. Especially when you think about most people having trouble switching app that takes literally 30 seconds (say, signal for instance), I feel like this is a big miss in this community where the time component seem to be absent in all the recommendations. To me and to many, this is critical. Convenience should absolutely be a factor when the choice is there.
There are also many other Librewolf pros as described by @eylin.
With that logic, PG should only recommend products that are self-hostable. Maintenance of a NAS is really nothing much after the initial learning curve.
I’ve also been daily driving Librewolf for more then a month and have yet to encounter any sort of site breakages.
And as again eylin said:
So I would 100% recommend Librewolf to anyone looking to switch from Chrome.
And I’m not even fedup with Mozilla as some are. Librewolf just is more private and maybe even more secure ,albeit the 1-3 days update delay, then plain Mozilla without Arkenfox.
Yes, actually it does exist, as I myself fit into that category. I’ve tried to install ArkenFox and do not understand it. I eventually gave up and went back to Librewolf. Luckily, I’ve known about Librewolf for a long time and find it easy to use. If I hadn’t known about it already and were looking on Privacy Guides for the first time trying to make a good privacy decision for myself, I would
- Just give up on Firefox since I couldn’t figure out how to use arkenfox
- Might use Mullvad for a particular use case, but can’t use it as an everyday browser because it breaks things more than Librewolf
- Maybe use Brave, but I wanted to get away from Chromium browsers because of all the stuff I’ve read elsewhere on the internet and don’t like all of the crypto stuff attached with the browser.
- In the end, just deciding to go back with good ole Chrome because it seems being private is just too complicated.
Reading the Librewolf wiki negates the argument that Librewolf is more convenient. I don’t understand why you would read the Librewolf wiki, but not Arkenfox wiki when most people won’t read either wiki.
I have a Synology NAS that I use for self-hosting. Troubleshooting is the biggest headache.
Also, PG recommends using a service provider if you can’t self-host *CORRECTLY
I never needed the Librewolf wiki because I’ve never had trouble using the browser. I’ve read the Arkekfox wiki, but still wasn’t able to install and use Arkenfox. To be fair, I haven’t read it in a while, so maybe they’ve updated it by now with easier to understand instructions (I don’t know). I may give it another shot and see how it goes. Librewolf has everything needed available in the settings so I just haven’t had the need to read their wiki.
Since nobody seemed to be working on porting the failing patches to release 145, I went ahead and did it.
I have no idea if it’s working correctly since I don’t use LibreWolf, but they should just ship it and not wait even longer.
Thank you for putting the work in. That’s really too bad, I was under the impression that they’ve been pretty good about putting in timely updates. Maybe it’s time to give Trivalent another spin…
Update: My pull request has been merged and is building now without failing. Once it has been tested there should be a new release soon.
Yes, before going back to uBO hard mode, I wanted to test if Librewolf would actually break sites on its own.
I don’t want LibreWolf to be added to the recommendations because it will attract the attention of the NSA and talking heads in the EU who (to protect children) will want to insert a backdoor. Let LibreWolf remain in the shadows.