this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Honest question, but what makes librewolf BETTER? In firefox you can easily toggle off the studies telemetry bullshit in the settings. Librewolf is just firefox with those things ripped out right?
I feel like I’m often getting new devices or reinstalling my OSes. I restart from scratch a lot. Going through the steps to harden Firefox becomes tedious. Librewolf starts from where I want to be.
They're abusing the default and making privacy settings require user intervention rather than defaulting to the most private settings and allowing the option of opting in.
It's abusing consent, so people move to browsers where privacy is the default option.
Blocking abp was the last straw for me, thank you for suggesting librewolf
This is what makes Librewolf better.
Yes. I consider it better because it's preconfigured for privacy, includes UBlock Origin by default, and rips Mozilla's telemetry out. So you never have to worry about them sneaking something new in a later update.
I'm more worried about the updates not happening in a timely fashion. Is it just a passion project by a handful of devs, or is there some kind of funding?
Update frequency/latency hasn't been an issue in the 2 years I've been using it.
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolf
Sure, but what about in 2 years from now?
I used IronFox for a couple years and it suddenly stopped getting updates, and it took me a few months to realize and switch to something else. I don't want that to happen again.
I like the idea of librewolf, especially that it's just a patch set on top of Firefox, but someone needs to maintain that patch set. This would be fine for simpler software, but browsers are complex and I just worry that updates will stall out with little warning.
Certainly a valid concern, but it's true with any software. I think enough people (techies especially) are using LibreWolf that a lack of updates would be visible quickly.
Perhaps. But a browser is something I'd prefer to just forget about and not track updates. So it's very likely that I won't check if it has gotten updates for a few months.
I've been using IronFox since it came out and I don't think it has been out for 2 years yet... are you thinking of Mull from which it was forked when DivestOS stop being maintained?
Also, I've been using Librewolf since its early days too, and their updates are always only 1 to 2 days behind an updated Firefox. I know cuz ai update daily on my Artix Linux machine and have both browsers. Whenever Firefox is updated its usually the same day or a day later that Librewolf is also updated to the same version number.
I get the concern, but honestly the Librewolf devs have proven themselves at keeping pace with the upstream for quite a few years now. Hopefully the Ironfox devs can do the same.
Yes, mull. My bad. IronFox is the replacement that I'm using now.
And that's part of my point. Once my browser is installed, I don't really care about it, so I'm unlikely to notice it not receiving updates unless someone calls it out on SM or something.
Two years is enough time for Firefox itself to cease to exist. Cross that bridge when you burn it
Maybe? It's a lot less likely for FF to disappear than LibreWolf.
Agreed. But it's still too far of a timeframe to be worried about imo
Yeah, perhaps I'll try it out. I've made most of the changes they did in my config though.
Do you use Firefox sync already?
Yup. Switching won't be a big deal.
Librewolf has sync disabled, but if you enable that it's as easy as signing in. If it goes to shit like you're worried about, you still have it syncing
I'm not worried about data loss. Honestly, the only feature I actually care about from sync is open tabs and recent history, since I'll often open something on one device that I was using on another. I don't really use bookmarks or saved passwords.
My main concern is security. I don't want my machines to be susceptible to malware, and with browsers being very complex, I want to make sure the dev team is very responsive in shipping security updates.
The main reason I use IronFox on my phone is that it works with FDroid, which is important because I don't have Google Play running on my main profile (I use GapheneOS). If the flatpak is updated within a few days of Firefox consistently, that's good enough. But if it takes weeks or more, that's too much.
They've been on point so far as far as I know
as I understand their build system is automatic. updates are not, but they have an update checker companion thing, and flathub too can manage that if you install from there
I’m not a contributor to LibreWolf so I can’t speak with authority on it but I can’t imagine that they are so different from Firefox that they wouldn’t be able to just merge 99% of updates from FF with minimal effort.
From looking at the repo, it looks like it's simply a set of patches that get applied to the Firefox source code. They don't maintain a fork, just a set of changes that get applied before building.
There's benefits to us not tweaking privacy settings. TOR explicitly discourages it. You don't (always) get fingerprinted by a single unique item, it's through an ensemble of data points that companies can identify who you are. There may be 10% of users with your same font library, and 1% who has the same monitor width, and 5% with the same time zone, and voila, when you multiply those percentages, you get close to one in a couple billion, and they've successfully fingerprinted you.
If everyone tweaks their settings from default Firefox, you reveal more information about yourself each time. You may think you're protecting yourself, but the reality is the opposite, you're creating a one of a kind browser config. This is where Librewolf can really reign supreme, if we all just use stock Librewolf, no one will be unique, and everyone will be anonymous.
Librewolf doesn’t just block Mozilla telemetry, it also has an easy to understand default for cookies and privacy settings so someone who isn’t a computer expert can rely on the librewolf’s defaults to keep trackers from being able to build a profile on you.