I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
For example, my config is at https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-flake/src/branch/mast...
I enabled Firefox sync and lost all my history. It was a user error: I should have disabled configuration sync (clear history when you close the browser).
After this incident, I decided I had enough, so I uninstalled LibreWolf. I recovered my lost history from different instances, but I don't want to spend my time making this browser work.
LibreWolf is a decent browser with annoying default settings, which made me lose more time than I wanted to make it work.
It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.
Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.
The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.
It’s a position, not a fetish.
The default should be privacy if you install a browser that focuses on privacy.
Obviously not, because at that point it can no longer be used to browse the web. (That said, "do no network requests" should be the default idle state of the browser until appropriate user interaction. Allowing CORS is also a horrible default but that ship has long sailed.)
I also disable WebGL in my Firefox profile and this does not inconvenience me in any way. So I do not think WebGL support is as instrumental to browsing the web as you claim; it entirely depends on what sites you visit. (And let's be honest here, a very significant majority of websites does not need WebGL.)
Network disabled is a straw man argument.
If somebody already has made the effort of creating an extension and maintaining it, why not use that?
Please pick a different browser if it is not for you. Waterfox has less restrictions and might be a better fit.
I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific website with just 1 click.
A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case) would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.
Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
Finger printing and privacy protection:
- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites
- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.
However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:
- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net
Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.
A user.js entry may help. user.js runs on startup of Firefox/Librewolf, so keep this in mind for your usage application.
the setting is: "privacy.resistFingerprinting", as in: user_pref("privacy.resistFingerprinting", true);
Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.
Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.
If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.
On the one hand yes, on the other - these times call for ditching US companies and switching to local (EU) ones. So it's better to tell these local ones to be more welcome / less hostile.
I have just yesterday asked Amazon to delete my account and all my personal data and stop processing it, quoting "Article 17 and Article 18 of the General Data Protection Regulation".
I'm also planning (as in: technically planning) to move all my data off AWS reasonably ASAP, too. It's personal stuff; mostly S3, domains registered and parked at Route53, some CloudFront distributions fronting static files, SQS/SNS - not much overall - and domains are the main PITA.
Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who needs to follow a strong opsec.
I parse this not as LibreWolf breaking anything, but instead as,
"LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are working against broken, dark-pattern websites"