Comment by pilaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilaf | Hacker News Reader

This made me look into Firefox forks/alternatives:

Librewolf [1] seems to be fairly active (last commit on Codeberg was last week) and up-to-date with the latest upstream releases (mirrors FF's versioning scheme and matches their latest). Has a nice focus on privacy and no-telemetry.

Floorp [2] also looks active (last commit last week), also claims focus on privacy. Based off FF's extended support releases so it may lag behind in latest features.

Waterfox [3] is also active (last commit a few hours ago), also big focus on privacy, but it uses a custom versioning scheme so I can't tell how closely it follows FF's releases.

GNU IceCat's [4] latest release was in November 02023, so it looks like it may be abandoned.

Does anyone have any experience with any of these, good or bad? With all of them more or less promising the same things it's hard to tell which one may be the better option.

1: https://librewolf.net/

2: https://floorp.app/en

3: https://www.waterfox.net/

4: https://icecatbrowser.org/

Try going to gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content. Librewolf is blocked off from half the internet that uses cloudflare, so it's kind of a useless browser.

Every browser that's not a majority browser will be associated with these kind of blocking risk. I can't risk access to my financially important accounts, nobody can. So to me this is not a feasible alternative.

The only way to build a browser is to act like one of the others, and to behave like one of the others. Can't use brave, given their history, but farbling approach is the most sustainable solution in my opinion.

My remaining hope is that ladybird will actively deny implementing web standards that can be used for fingerprinting.

Something as simple as overflow:hidden is used on every website to force people to get tracked by having to activate JS, and things like this should be something a web browser should protect its users from.

We need a CSS engine that denies setting these kinds of things, because JS fingerprint prevention isn't enough if every website breaks because of it.

If you want a headstart, I tried forking webkit and do exactly this. Project is unmaintained because couldn't work fulltime on it without funding. Maybe somebody else picks it up? [1]

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

This is purely FUD per my experience. I use librewolf on websites behind cloudflare and with plenty of js. They all work just as well as they did in Firefox.

Librewolf sends Firefox in the user agent, and you can toggle Firefox "features" on if a website you use requires them.

Not trying to convince you to switch to it--you do you. Just sharing with someone who might be reading this thread and that hasn't tried librewolf.

The amount of re-edits of your comment are a bit off the charts.

Why do you think I have a personal stake in this? Why do you feel personally attacked by my comment?

I am sorry if I somehow personally offended you!? Not sure how I could've phrased my comment differently.

Yeah, I thought it was unnecessarily confrontational and tried to make it clear that's not my intent.

I'm not offended in the slightest, just a very happy user who wants to encourage other people to try librewolf for themselves.

Yea, I just went clicking all over gitlab.com and their own repository without issue on LibreWolf.

> Try going to gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content.

> If you want a headstart, I tried forking webkit and do exactly this

> [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

I just opened that page on LibreWolf without any problems.

Lab and hub are different words.

https://gitlab.com/explore works fine with my LibreFox as well.

> gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content

It works fine, even with JS disabled.

I use librewolf as my daily driver after the Firefox "privacy preserving ad measurement" SNAFU last year [1,2]. The fingerprint resistant and anti-canvas functions were different, but I got used to them and I really appreciate the added features.

With that, having everything turned on can break some sites. If a site wasn't all that important and isn't respecting privacy, I just won't visit it. Otherwise, I'll keep another browser around just in case I absolutely must for business or something else.

When Firefox began opting people in by default to leak data to advertisers, it felt like the beginning of the end to me. After looking into canvas and other fingerprinting capabilities, it's somehow still surprising and alarming to me how far companies go to invade our privacy.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112

Iceweasel has been around for sometime:

https://github.com/adonais

https://sourceforge.net/projects/libportable/files/Iceweasel...

Forks can be healthy for a number of reasons =3

Oh, I thought IceWeasel had been renamed to IceCat, but the repo you linked to has recent activity and calls it IceWeasel, now I'm a bit confused. Glad to see it's active though.

The Gnu Icecat is still active as well.

Compiling Firefox without telemetry is just a flag, as we discovered while doing something over the debugging interface not available in the Windmill Test Framework. Tip: running profiles off a ram drive reaches ludicrous speeds.

Tor Browser also works: https://www.torproject.org/download/languages/

Best of luck =3

thanks for the research. I just quickly tried them all. I have an older mac with older FF. Results: librewolf and waterfox wont run (10.15 min) and the floorp (react) website crashes. IceCat runs! and seems to use LibreJS for javascript, so my first few tests failed because you have to individually allow scripts per site. I quite like that idea! although my quick test of breakout (HN yesterday) runs slow/stuttery. A couple other sites are throwing up js console errors, so I need to play around with it more. It did enable me to access the floorp website, but also 10.15 min. I guess this helps me migrate faster to my asahi setup, although I've been trying to keep that one away from daily browsing and the little web of horrors.

I wonder if this FF change is pre AI infection, which might end up affecting these other builds too. Pretty disappointing after such strong privacy promises for so long, whatever the reason for these changes.

> I have an older mac with older FF. Results: librewolf and waterfox wont run (10.15 min)

That's just because Firefox itself requires at least macOS 10.15. IceCat only works because it's based off of Firefox ESR; once the next ESR comes out IceCat won't work either.

There is a fork of Firefox (which is in fact the web browser I use) that adds back support for older versions of macOS. At the moment, it supports all the way back to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. However, this is all it does; it does not contain any additional privacy features above and beyond mainline Firefox. However, I guess it technically isn't a Mozilla product, so you won't need to agree to Mozilla's Terms of Service.

https://github.com/i3roly/firefox-dynasty/releases

you should add zen browser[1] too, i tried some from your list, librewolf breaks some websites (online banking doesn't work) floorp is a good one, but in my experience zen is better.

1: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop

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