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.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Unfortunately, adding any addons to the Mullvad browser would defeat the purpose of using it somewhat, since it would defeat the anti-fingerprinting methods.

    The Librewolf team member said they’re falling behind on keeping the arkenfox tweaks up to date, despite putting out new releases. Perhaps they are able to keep up with Firefox security updates despite that, which I suppose would still make them a better option than vanilla Firefox, but it does give reason to keep a closer eye on them.

    • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 days ago

      For me the main use case for LibreWolf isn’t so much being anonymous as it is wanting a browser that doesn’t have ads and data mining stuff going on and has some additional privacy protections but that also doesn’t get in the way too much in terms of usability. Zen Browser might be a better fit for this use case now since it improves the UI while claiming to not have telemetry, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’m not really concerned about fingerprinting since most sites I use already know who I am since I’m logged into them. If I wanted to be really private though I’d use Tor or Mullvad, but not as a daily driver since I value UX more as long as it’s not invasive.