When I see people talking about LibreWolf it’s always loved it or hated it.
People that hated complain that either it requires too much configuration to make it usable (because of the strict default settings) or that you should just use Mullvad because (either real reasons or just better marketing about privacy)
People that loved (include me) just see it as being what FireFox should be, community driven and user first. However, I believe that everyone that is using LibreWolf as main browser (like me) is only doing that because they tweaked the settings. Allowed saving browsing history, saving passwords, manually added cookie exceptions for the sites you want to stay logged in, etc.
Out of the box, LibreWolf seems like it’s trying to compete with Mullvad and Tor as a hardcore privacy-first browser (although letterboxing isn’t default?), but can it really do it? I mean, I’m not saying it can’t on a technical level (which I’m in no way qualified to judge), but Mullvad is a huge company and Tor a very mature project… I’ve read a bunch of guides and people talking about privacy browsers, and I never saw anyone recommending LibreWolf over Mullvad or Tor if you want to browse sensitive content or use an online identity you don’t want to be so easily linked to your main one.
Isn’t LibreWolf fans using it as the main browser for daily-use? The way I see it (and I don’t know how aligned it is with the project itself, nor the rest of the user base) LibreWolf is an alternative to Chrome, FireFox, and especially Brave. It’s a really community-drive project with focus on privacy that prioritizes the user and isn’t involved in shady business like Brave.
So, well, when I recommend LibreWolf to people, I recommend it as a substitute for Brave, but out of the box it feels like trying to be an alternative to Mullvad/Tor instead…
I think it’s neither. Mullvad and Tor are a bit more extreme in their defaults, but LibreWolf is not as vanilla as your average browser. I think a welcome screen explaining the address bar controls for toggling data storage and disabling fingerprinting protection on broken trusted sites would make it much more practical.
I don’t think LibreWolf should allow that DRM crap and other vanilla shit like that, but I don’t quite understand the project aim. Is it to be a browser for daily-use or a browser that is to be used only for when you want extra privacy (so it doesn’t try to be convenient)?
Mullvad is quite broken for daily-use, and I guess it wasn’t designed for that anyway. You can’t save password, cookie exceptions seems to not work properly… you seem to have to either erase everything when you close the browser or erase nothing, so in that way LibreWolf is way more friendly for daily-use - I especially liked being able to add Enhanced Tracking Protection exceptions, because I few sites I visit has CORS chatboxes.
So although very configurable for daily use, the out of the box experience suggest the project is not for that?
If everyone using allows saving browsing history, passwords, and add cookie exceptions, I guess those should be the default (most bad reviews I saw complained about it, because not having those as default put it into the “inconvenient” class of Mullvad and Tor), and a prompt asking if you want to stay logged to that site when you save a password so that it’s automatically added to exceptions would be nice too hehe
I think the goal is to be a browser for daily use for privacy-conscious people who are willing to do some work in telling the browser what information to keep/give and to whom. That means it’s likely not meant for the general public, more like privacy nerds and those so inclined to see the browser as a more fine-grained tool to access information rather than a pragmatic, straightforward interface into various web services.
Privacy, like security, is usually at odds with convenience. I agree with you it could be made more convenient, and as I said I think the first time you start LibreWolf it should tell you about some of its convenient features such as the address bar toggles.
So yes, Mullvad is not meant for daily use doing all your browsing, much less Tor Browser. I think you can use LibreWolf as your main browser, particularly if you use several browser profiles. You can e.g. have a separate “work” profile, where you might need to keep/allow more things from corporate systems from personal browsing, where you can block more aggressively and access mostly things you trust. This way you don’t need to have an all-or-nothing approach to your privacy.
I don’t think storing passwords, cookies and other information should be the default. In fact that is one of my favorite features in LibreWolf. I think it’s an excellent default, but it needs some adjusting to in how you think about the browser. That’s why I think it should have a screen on the first run for the first profile explaining its controls, because it does make all this convenient in some ways, but one has to discover that convenience by themselves and at that point frustration might have already overcome them.
Hmm, yeah, perhaps it’s better not to have those by default, as it is privacy/security‑oriented… It would be fun to discover how many users change those settings though, if only they gathered telemetry data xD
I just remembered this documentary I watched about industrialized food, and when they created cake‑mix powder in the '50s the housewives didn’t like it because they didn’t feel like they were making the cake, so the industry removed the dried eggs from the recipe just so the housewives would have to add the eggs and whisk the cake themselves and feel like real bakers… look at us, we are so selective about our software and like to fine‑tune it to our needs. If it already came all configured for us, we would feel like normies hehe