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Comment by PrimeMcFly | Hacker News Reader

I switched to LibreWolf (A fork of Firefox with privacy enhancements and ublock preinstalled) and haven't had to deal with anything like this since.

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Just have in mind that some advanced privacy enhancements (like toggling privacy.resistFingerprinting) can break sites in random ways: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666160 .

privacy.resistFingerprinting is something I had to set to false in my user.js, but I had my own user.js with my own privacy settings anyway. The rest of the settings it provides are very good for a default though.

Breaking (shitty and user-hostile) websites by default is still a lot better than ignoring your privacy preferences and trying to psychologically manipulate you by default.

What’s your user agent with that browser?

Same as FireFox normal.

Interesting. When I used Iceweasel it was different enough to break sites.

I'm guessing that was because Debian refused/wasn't able to sue the Firefox branding and they extended that to the user agent. So a ton of sites just saw Iceweasel as the UA and broke because it was unexpected.

Yeah I’m surprised more forks don’t have this issue. Maybe they’re too small for Mozilla to care.

LibreWolf isn't strictly a fork of Firefox, it's a preconfigured installation that locks things down and disables anti-features. So it's strictly accurate to use the Firefox user agent, because that's what actually gets compiled.

Wasn't the issue with the Iceweasel UA purely on Debian's end, them not like or agreeing to the Firefox terms? I don't think most forks would have that issue

No, it was a trademark issue, raised by Mozilla (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622) and seemingly resolved on their (Mozilla's) end (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006). For what it's worth, the recent Rust trademark issue seems to be of a similar vein (and the justifications around the Firefox sound like those used in Rust).

Thanks for clarifying!

Can you provide any evidence that the User Agent name was a trademark issue. As in the name exposed to websites. Because that is the only thing that matters here and also where everyone claims to be a variant of Mozilla for compatibility.

Mozilla apparently fixed this (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006) so it sounds like forks don't have that issue now?

> I switched to Librefox

You mean LibreWolf?

Yes, thanks. Fixed.

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