this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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I do genuinely believe that these Firefox forks are mostly pointless rebrands of Firefox to satisfy a small crowd of people who are fine with Firefox but don’t want Firefox or Mozilla branding. Other than branding, they tweak the default config, pre-install ublock origin, and that’s about it. I guess this one exposes some already existing about:config flags in the settings UI. The best part is they are managed by small teams that run a few versions behind Firefox persistently, leaving 0-days unpatched and thus their users vulnerable. Their small userbase also opens their users up to tracking that wouldn’t be possible with larger browsers.
Not true, FF comes with few binary blobs which are removed from Librewolf. Also there are some things disabled entirely at build time, so they are removed from being an option. So it's not just the settings, and it's not plain re-branding. Some distros has gotten it wrong, believing that it's just a matter of settings, but at least on the case of Librewolf and the Tor browser that's not the case.
That hey depend on FF continuous development to exist is true, that doesn't mean they just rebrand.
Tor browser is something else, I don't group it in with stuff like Librewolf.
For librewolf, I just took a look to try and figure out what binary blobs are being talked about. This is the repository I was looking at, I think its the right place: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source/src/branch/main. There isn't much documentation on the patches besides the file names for the most part, but do you have any idea which of these relates to binary blobs? Or is it in the settings file? Really nothing I see here convinces me that this project is worth anybody's time over regular firefox, it just changes some defaults, disables pocket (they patch it out, but there's already a setting), and changes the branding. I don't disagree with most of their changes, I just don't see the point of maintaining and marketing an entire derivative browser for what could just be a settings hardening guide on a wiki somewhere.
There are several patches under its patches source directory, and there are different sort of packages, one example is the
sedpatch to avoid includingpocketin the build. The DRM widevine is not included either on the build, though it can be installed if you want it installed (probably there's a patch for that somewhere).But I no longer see removing binary blobs being advertised by Librewolf, it's been a while since I don't check on their site...
I guess I don’t see the point of removing pocket from the build since it can be disabled in a standard Firefox build with a single about:config option. That’s what I do.