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mima wrote

While I respect LibreWolf's efforts of providing an alternative to Mozilla, I can't say I'm a fan of them. I just wish they've gone with the "minimal rebuild" route where it's just Firefox with bullshit removed (telemetry, Pocket, etc.), and tbh I'm surprised none of the Firefox "forks" (I'm putting it in quotes because I don't think most of them can be considered one as they aren't really diverging from Mozilla significantly to be considered a fork IMO) has really done this. But then maybe I shouldn't be because if even Pale Moon's lead dev (who is an expert in making a proper, professional-looking rebranding of Firefox) found it too time-consuming to make such a rebuild (even if it's just as minimal as removing bloat and only changing the branding), then nobody else would bother either. Those who do the rebuilds would think it would be better if they make significant changes to distinguish themselves to make the effort worth it, and I can't blame them. Tragedy of the commons or smth I guess.

So yeah I'm basically complaining about them bundling uBlock Origin (I'm not even sure if that's legal, since the Mozilla code is under the MPL while the extension is under the GPL, two totally different licenses) and tweaking default about:config settings for the sake of "privacy" and "security" while not caring about whether it's gonna break websites or not. I don't have anything against uBlock (I use it actually), but come on. Don't you trust the user whether they want to install the add-on or not? Maybe they want a different content blocker. Browser devs shouldn't push an extension against the user's will, but hey maybe it's different in the "privacy world". Thankfully you can still remove the add-on, but the user shouldn't have to do that. Opt-in or bust.

There's another problem with LibreWolf that is also found on other rebuilds, but is more important and relevant for LibreWolf since it's promoting itself as a "hardened browser". It keeps up with Mozilla's updates too slow. They released their 113.0 FOUR days after Mozilla did for example. Fortunately the security vulnerabilities fixed in 113 aren't critical, but still. You'd think with a 7-person team they would've figured out how to keep up with Mozilla's rabid release schedule by now... If they can't do that, they really should consider going the ESR route instead.

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idkalice wrote (edited )

fair points, im well aware that librewolf does break a lot of websites

do you have another browser you like or recommend? i've heard of konqueror but idk much about it

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mima wrote (edited )

I use Floorp which is an ESR rebuild for my Firefox/Gecko needs. It admittedly has a lot more "bloat" than LibreWolf, but I can cut them some slack as they closely follow Mozilla's ESR security fixes (within 1 day of Mozilla's release!), make user customization a lot user-friendly (kinda like Vivaldi), and it's developed by a two-man team of Japanese students (which I guess explains the bloat, I think it's a Japanese cultural thing to pack as much things into one as possible).

Unfortunately as I said earlier it is following ESR, which means I will be missing some newer features found in the latest stable rapid release. Might not be a big deal for you, but for me it kinda is because I do want a latest reference Gecko I can compare to at any time without resorting to using Mozilla directly. There's a rebuild called Mercury which does follow Mozilla's rapid release schedule, but it lags very hard behind the latest release, and it currently is at 112 even though 113 has been available for like a week now. It also requires at least a CPU with AVX instructions supported. And the dev (only one-man) has so many active projects (fork of Chromium called Thorium, with many different builds including a Windows 7 compatible one, as well as a fork of ChromiumOS called ThoriumOS) that I seriously doubt they can do real QA and stuff on their browsers. So can't really recommend it. And I don't know of any other good rebuild that is on the rapid release train...

Haven't used Konqueror much so don't have an opinion about it...

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idkalice wrote

thank you! i don't think esr bothers me personally

sorry for asking another question, what about pale moon? you've said that you're a developer for it

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mima wrote

Hey, if you want to try Pale Moon, then try it! It's one of the most customizable browsers out there, and is one of the few that is truly developed independently. It's just that I'm not sure whether it would be a good idea to evangelize it as a developer lol (I'd rather let the power users do that), and it has web compat issues which can be a deal breaker (though we've massive improved on that front since the release of 32.1.0 enabling WebComponents support by default, which was a big headache for us at the time, and just recently 32.2.0 this month, adding support for other big headaches like dynamic module import and JavaScript's C++-like class fields)...

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