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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

My essential Firefox fix is Librewolf.

Unlike many Firefox forks, it tracks modern Firefox. I believe they run a similar set of tweaks to Tor browser, just without the Tor. This is quite nice. It’s autoplay blocking has actual teeth: I’m delighted when YouTube’s annoying autoplay-next-video is foiled by it.

Since it is smaller and from a less well-known group of developers, I can totally understand this being untenable. But the added risk is worth it for me, because while it isn’t perfect, it feels like I have gotten a little slice of control back with it.

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Came here to state the same, for a few years my firefox fix was to use waterfox[1] instead of firefox.

And now my best firefox fix is to use librewolf[2] instead of waterfox instead of firefox.

I had enough of mozilla treating me and my business like sh*t when the silently dropped alsa support on a ESR release and justifying by saying linux distro package maintainer should have not disabled our surveillance and tracking and no one wants to work on ALSA as it is a mess, turns mozilla code was a mess and in a matter of days someone came up volunteering to do the works they refused to, but then they switched their stance to say it's too late they're not going back to alsa just deal with it.

So I dealt with it by switching to waterfox which supported alsa with no plan of stopping and allowed firefox extensions to keep working.

When will mozilla stop hurting its own product by trying to make it the same as google's browser and mistreating their user base and supporters ?

[1]: https://www.waterfox.net/ [2]: https://librewolf.net/

Librewolf applies a few very small patches to the Firefox codebase (to remove Mozilla's VPN promotion, etc), but I don't think they have the resources to maintain dropped features, or any other significant deviations from the official codebase. I view it as a custom Firefox build rather than a fork.

> I’m delighted when YouTube’s annoying autoplay-next-video is foiled by it.

YouTube has this built-in nowadays. The button is at the bottom of the player, on the right hand side, on the left of the subtitles/captions button.

I believe that the commenter above is referring to instant playback when you click on a YouTube link, not about autoplaying the next video.

Though I have that in vanilla Firefox and it works fine for me on YouTube.

I don’t think they ever shipped it without the ability to disable it, I’m just happy it doesn’t work by default. It will try, but it can’t actually play unless you click. This tiny detail made me instantly feel more in control again.

Makes me wonder what the web would be like if browsers were never subject to this conflict of interest in the first place and always prioritized keeping the user in control.

I like it when I tell a website it can play video, that it can also play more video without having me click again and again.

Easy fix: just allow it to autoplay using the icon in the address bar. And you can add this allowance permanently.

This is how it should work. It only doesn’t because autoplay is great for metrics and it’s nice for their metrics that all major browsers allow YouTube to autoplay.

Great! Have a "play next automatically" toggle with an "always do this" checkbox.

Yeah, the annoying thing about that button is it defaults to “on”, though.

So if you’re, say, opening a video in incognito because you want to watch a single video without that channel being recommended for the next 6 months, that little autoplay button is always toggling itself back on.

I use my own extension to always disable the automatic playback of the next video on YouTube.

https://github.com/dessant/youtube-autoplay#readme

Yes, but it defaults to on, which is rather annoying when you auto-wipe cookies frequently to hinder tracking.

Have you heard of freetube[1] ?

I find the experience way better than vanilla youtube in a browser. It allows to remove all youtube annonyances (autoplay, comments, suggestions, ads, in video ads, and more) and tweak a number of things.

Only a couple downside for me, the playlist support is a bit shaky and once in while a video will fail to load or start and requires closing and reopening the window.

[1]: https://freetubeapp.io/

I set the following within about:config. It's killed a lot of annoying auto play videos for me.

- media.autoplay.default = 5

- media.autoplay.blocking_policy = 2

It looks like a great project, but I'm afraid it exceeds the privacy protections rendering it somewhat unfeasible to be a primary browser.

uBO pre installed, telemetry turned off, etc are all great steps, but the lack of DRM, for example, makes it a deal breaker for me. Brave, despite their shady practices with their own ads and cryptocurrency, is at the sweetspot balance between privacy and functionality.

I find the time it takes to fine tune my Firefox worth the work, but Librewolf looks like a project I would gladly trust with good privacy defaults.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think vanilla Firefox also comes with DRM disabled. Like on librewolf, you can just enable DRM and be on your way.

One thing I've found, is that even if you enable DRM, librewolf sometimes still fails on Netflix. Just the other day I got redirected to a help page about Microsoft silverlight when trying to play a movie, had to fallback to Firefox.

It goes way too far on the "privacy oriented defaults" spectrum, I think. Why would I want a browser that does not save history by default?

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