I’ve been a user of Librewolf for a about a year now, and it’s always served me pretty well as a nice easy way to get a hardened Arkenfox Firefox.

However, recently I was curious why Librewolf wasn’t recommended on PrivacyGuides, and took a look through their reasoning on their forum. That thread spans multiple years, and for the most part I thought their reasons for not including it were a bit unfair, especially after Librewolf started offering automatic updates.

But towards the end of that thread in October, a Privacy guide team member posted a link to the Arkenfox github issue tracker, where a Librewolf team member reveals how the project appeared to have lost steam after a critical member left, and they are struggling to keep it up to date with the latest Arkenfox updates, despite putting out new releases.

I’m not sure if those problems have been resolved since that time. One of the maintainers did mention they’re still short staffed in this topic on taking over maintaining Mull.

After considering the arguments for and against in the PrivacyGuides thread, I think their conclusion for not recommending it was ultimately correct. Using Librewolf adds an additional layer of trust, not only to not be malicious (which I don’t suspect they are) but to also be able to adequately fulfill what they set out to do reliably.

Another big part of them not recommending it was the existence of the Mullvad Browser, which I didn’t realize was in fact a very well hardened version of Firefox (essentially the Tor browser without the Tor part), and is far more effective for private browsing compared to Librewolf or an Arkenfox’d firefox.

Ultimately you’ll have to come to your own conclusion, but personally I’ll be switching back to Firefox as my convenient daily browser full of addons, alongside the mullvad browser for (more) private browsing.

  • calm.like.a.bomb@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    I will not trust a site that recommends Brave as a secure browser. I’m no security expert, but for a long time Brave proved they’re shady and I can’t trust them. Also, for mobile browsers I can’t see any recommendation of a firefox-based one, which is a shame.

    • Samsy@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 day ago

      Oh thx, I don’t trust brave for years and confused about all these privacy recommendations.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I agree on Brave, and I also avoid it so as not to solidify the chromium browser dominance any further.

      However, from all I have read, Firefox Mobile based browsers truly are less secure from a technological standpoint. I think for most people, Firefox Mobile is secure enough for it not to be enough of a deciding factor to use a chromium browser, but objectively it is worse. Mull was making the best of that despite the downsides, so hopefully the IronFox fork succeeds on mobile.

      And despite their recommending Brave, I think the arguments against LibreWolf do have some merit.

    • ivn@jlai.lu
      0·
      2 days ago

      Sadly Firefox has no tab sandboxing on mobile so yeah, it is less secure.

      And while I agree the Brave company is shady, the browser has good security features.

      • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 days ago

        There’s Vanadium and Cromite which have ad-blocking and strong security and none of the problems Brave has barring Chromium monopoly

        • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          I believe Brave is better from a fingerprinting perspective, if only due to it being easier to blend in with compared to Cromite, though Cromite has far better security AFAIK.

          • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
            0·
            2 days ago

            I’m not sure how Brave is significantly better for fingerprinting than Cromite other than being more popular, which it still isn’t popular anyways and both of them can be bypassed with more advanced scripts. Vanadium is the most secure, being part of the GrapheneOS project, but all of the Chromium-based Android browsers have better security than FF-based currently, although I just saw somewhere that IronFox is enabling process isolation which is currently experimental.