this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Is there anything better about LibreWolf that can’t be achieved by altering Firefox settings?
It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.
Firefox doesn't invade anyone's privacy.
Sadly, with default settings that’s the case. Partly due to Telemetry being active and Google being the default search engine.
Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it's pretty well anonymized. It's also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.
You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing. I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.
There is nothing personally-identifiable in the data Mozilla collects in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
You seem to ignore information collected about you is collected information about you.
This seems like and IS personally identifiable information….
What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? I'm not saying they aren't there, it's just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think we're going to far.
There's a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it's a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Why then not use Chrome if you are fine with Google?!
Chromium is deprecating manifest v2 and the newer v3 has neutered ad blocking capabilities. In Alphabet's SEC fillings they list ad blocking as a challenge to their revenue. End users can't just flip v2 back on (unless the devs of their browser put work to let them). End users can change their default search engine though. Very easily. Trivially so. Who knows, maybe as a result of that court ruling we'll see browsers forced to have no default search engine in the future. I think that's better, yes, but I really don't think having Google Search as the default is that massive of a concern compared to much of the other shit they're doing.
I guess, this is most of the changes they do: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/
There's maybe a handful where I'm not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where it's technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There's not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting
extensions.pocket.enabledtofalse.I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, there's also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.