It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:

  1. It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
  2. It has ads right out of the box.
  3. It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
  4. They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
  • Electricd@lemmybefree.netEnglish
    64·
    2 days ago

    Librewolf’s defaults are so bad, and changing them basically entirely removes the anti fingerprinting features

    • Bilb!@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I agree, I know why they do it and I can appreciate it, but it’s just not for me. I do not want my history and cookies cleared when I closed the browser, for instance. That is massively inconvenient and not really relevant to my “threat model.”

      So I guess I wouldn’t say they are bad, but certainly not ideal for me.

      • Electricd@lemmybefree.netEnglish
        21·
        14 hours ago

        Forced English language, light mode, fixed window size or borders, cookies removed after closing, no history(? Not sure about this one)

        Want those or just one of them? You have to remove ALL fingerprinting protections for some reasons. Might as well use Firefox then…

    • towerful@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Never used librewolf.
      But it sounds like the conveniences you want are a compromise for fingerprinting.

      Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.
      The internet has been significantly ruined by large companies.
      There is a loop where companies with the resources to create and maintain frameworks/tooling/whatever are large enough to help define “features” for browsers.
      Browsers don’t make money, not really. To even be considered, they have to be able to run what the big companies are pushing.
      All of this makes it very easy for smaller companies to deliver better websites. Or abuse the features big companies are pushing.

      It’s like: email was awesome, then spam emails happened. Websites were accessible, then SPAs happened. Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.

      I don’t know what I am trying to say.
      Other than browsers do not get the support they deserve to actually be decent unless they are backed by a company that wants to loss-lead them… Which has resulted in the web being pretty fucked

      • Electricd@lemmybefree.netEnglish
        1·
        13 hours ago

        Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.

        Same can be said about fingerprinting protection.

        Search engines were useful, the scraping/AI happened.

        Google’s quality has decreased, but other engines have improved, and LLM search summaries are really good (brave search is a good example of this)

        I think LibreWolf enforces compromises I’m not willing to do, instead of using different techniques