Edit: I may have given too much weight the the Arkenfox dev’s assessment. Upon more research and consideration, I think Librewolf could still be a better option compared to straight Firefox, though hopefully the Librewolf team receive more help/contributors in the future to ensure its success long term.

I’ve been a user of Librewolf for a about a year now, and it’s always served me pretty well as a nice easy way to get a hardened Arkenfox Firefox.

However, recently I was curious why Librewolf wasn’t recommended on PrivacyGuides, and took a look through their reasoning on their forum. That thread spans multiple years, and for the most part I thought their reasons for not including it were a bit unfair, especially after Librewolf started offering automatic updates.

But towards the end of that thread in October, a Privacy guide team member posted a link to the Arkenfox github issue tracker, where a Librewolf team member reveals how the project appeared to have lost steam after a critical member left, and they are struggling to keep it up to date with the latest Arkenfox updates, despite putting out new releases.

I’m not sure if those problems have been resolved since that time. One of the maintainers did mention they’re still short staffed in this topic on taking over maintaining Mull.

After considering the arguments for and against in the PrivacyGuides thread, I think their conclusion for not recommending does have some merit. Using Librewolf adds an additional layer of trust, not only to not be malicious (which I don’t suspect they are) but to also be able to adequately fulfill what they set out to do reliably.

Another big part of them not recommending it was the existence of the Mullvad Browser, which I didn’t realize was in fact a very well hardened version of Firefox (essentially the Tor browser without the Tor part), and is far more effective for private browsing compared to Librewolf or an Arkenfox’d firefox.

Ultimately you’ll have to come to your own conclusion, but personally I’ll be switching back to Firefox as my convenient daily browser full of addons, alongside the mullvad browser for (more) private browsing.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    2·
    18 hours ago

    To clarify, the only relevancy PrivacyGuides has here is that their forum is where I found the link to the Arkenfox github issue, and how their arguments against Librewolf appeared to have been potentially validated by said github issue.

    The main concern is that github issue, where one of the main developers of Arkenfox, from which Librefox is derived, claims:

    LW since fxbrit left/died/who-knows has gone to shit - I worked with him behind the scenes to make the right choices and while he would do his own analysis, we always agreed, and his voice influenced them. Now they don’t know what they are doing, and in fact have compromised security and make really stupid decisions. Same goes for all the other forks - really dubious shit going

    And directly after which a Librewolf team member then voices agreement that Librewolf’s quality control has degraded since the departure of fxbrit.

    Now it could be that the Arkenfox dev is exaggerating, and tbh he comes off as a bit of a prick later in that github issue, but overall, I’d say it merits at least some concern (though perhaps less than I originally thought)

    • drspod@lemmy.ml
      2·
      17 hours ago

      It sounds like what he was really doing was managing the relationship with upstream, and from the tone that the Arkenfox developer takes, it sounds like it was a relationship that needed managing.