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.
In general Fwy does not agree with the Privacy Guides assessment; and feels that the concerns about the project are simply not credible without stronger evidence of excessively slowed or missed updates.
Project devs do have lives and I’m not personally going to punish that; so long as the software remains reasonably maintained and free of bugs while still considering the project’s number of devs.
Is it better than Mull? Probably not in the strictest sense; but I’m also not happy with “Mull” either; as this browser makes more choices that breaks functionality than Librewolf does in the pursuit of privacy.
Additionally; I cannot trust that “Mull” will not enshittify; it is maintained by a company who is REQUIRED to some extent to make profits. That breeds enshittification. Mull would be one bad CEO or core executive team shift away from potentially being targeted as a profit vehicle and it’s privacy benefits weakened or removed entirely so the company can make money.
In general I trust Librewolf on a pretty regular basis to protect my privacy when my Addon-driven version of manually hardened Firefox breaks up a websites functionality too badly. It provides essential privacy protections without breaking too many things and serves as a good baseline browser.
As a rule; I keep several different browsers installed to mitigate lack of website function and isolate away any websites that would be more invasive in what privacy protections must be disabled to use properly. “Setting-Hardened and Privacy-Addon-driven Firefox” is what I use day to day, but “a semi-Amnesic* Librewolf (Incognito windows if untrusted website)” is second and is used daily in trusted website scenarios or in case a website is breaking too badly from plugin interactions. Finally; a fairly vanilla and infrequently used copy of Ungoogled Chromium is kept on hand for situations where Chromium is just required; where I can spin up empty profiles easily for anything I don’t trust and configure it to just flush everything on exit.
Did you mean Mullvad Browser? Mull is discontinued by the sole developer, and it wasn’t run by a company.
Ah; yeah. Mullvad Browser is what I mean clearly; as I mentioned it’s maintained by a company, which while they are currently trusted by most people; are always a few management changes away from becoming corrupt and abusing customer trust.