Arkenfox: Firefox privacy, security and anti-tracking user.js template | Hacker News Reader

Arkenfox: Firefox privacy, security and anti-tracking user.js template

github.com

77 pointsibraheemdev8 comments

For some context, there was discussion about Arkenfox over at the LibreWolf post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30722884

If this is actually needed, then Mozilla needs to seriously rethink its life choices.

We should be thankful that this is even possible. Mozilla has been working hard for over 20 years to give us free browsers with control over the user agent. They've had to cater to big companies to remain in silicon valley with the competitive salaries of that area.

But so far, imho, no fork of Firefox has any point to it that a simple user.js can't fix. (Unless you're paranoid about the download IDs)

> They've had to cater to big companies to remain in silicon valley

Delicate wording for being "Google's controlled opposition" or simply "Google's bitch".

> with the competitive salaries of that area.

At the time Mitchell Baker gets a raise up to 3mil/y to have a salary similar to "competitive roles elsewhere", Mozilla has 75% market share drop and loses developers due to inability to remunerate them. All for the benefit of Google pretending lack of monopoly and placing their malware on Mozilla's websites praising Mozilla's focus on privacy.

Today's Mozilla deserves no trust.

The arkenfox user.js is not default in Firefox because there are tradeoffs between security, privacy and usability. The Tor Browser is a Firefox that sacrifices some usability.

The same goes for most other software. It would be desirable for all cloud databases for example to hide their data and what being searched from the server, but that can be only done securely with an unpractical (logarithmic) communication or computation overhead (using searchable encryption).

No, thanks to Mozilla this is actually possible and is not in other popular browsers.

Might be worth pointing out this was previously known as the ghacks.net's user.js, and been available for years, https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js

So between this and librewolf, librewolf is still the strongest option when it comes to privacy oriented browsing ?

As for all the shortcomings people talk about librewolf, DRM, history, sessions, webgl, etc: I have all that enabled in my librewolf instance, you could say that defeats the purpose but it's still waaaaay better than vanilla Firefox due to all the stripped telemetry and all the other privacy oriented setting that I didn't touch.

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