Librewolf is not associated with Mozilla and does not receive their primary source of funding from Google like Mozilla does. I really like having the same browser and browser synchronization between my phone and desktop/laptop, so librewolf is out for me. They have no interest or resources to build an Android version. Waterfox does at least have desktop / android option and takes things at least one small step further away from Google.

Switching from Firefox to Librewolf has some pros and cons. Librewolf is a fork of Firefox focused on privacy and security, with telemetry stripped out and privacy settings maxed out by default. You’ll gain better out-of-the-box privacy protections, meaning less tracking and data collection without having to tweak settings yourself.

However, you might lose some convenience. Librewolf might not support certain Firefox features like Sync, since it relies on Mozilla’s servers (not sure about that point, maybe it does work). It can also break some websites due to the stricter privacy settings. Another thing to consider is that you won’t get updates as quickly as Firefox.

Regarding browser fingerprinting, it’s a tricky beast. Librewolf can help somewhat by making your fingerprint less unique, but it’s not a silver bullet. Tools like uBlock Origin and container tabs are great, but adding something like the CanvasBlocker extension can also help reduce fingerprinting. Ultimately, no setup is perfect, but Librewolf is a solid step towards better privacy.

Yes, why to do this?

if it’s fingerprinting you care about, i’d give mullvad browser a try. it’s a firefox fork tailored to increase privacy and blend you into the crowd (as long as you don’t change any setting/install addons). it’s very very neat.

Mostly it’s just FF but with more private defaults (that you can change in the settings trivially anyway), although there are one or two extras.

There is a potential issue, though. Librewolf runs behind, so security vulnerabilities, particularly for zero-day exploits, take longer to be patched.

🦊🦊

This is good news since Vivaldi is my goto chromium browser (when I need to really use it)

I like your style. I went looking and found “switchbar” which kinda/sorta eases this bouncing between browsers idea:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/open-with-switchbar/klgpknafjlhnpkppfbihchgfebbdcomd

It’s not elegant, but it supports the workflow you suggest. I kind of like the idea of using Edge for google.com and Chrome for microsoft.com. I’m not optimizing my experience (it may in fact be very sub-optimal), but I’m also using competition to neutralize potential shenanigans.

Welp, might as well just use w3m 🤣

Relevant username.

Wrll you have to use a pixel phone to use graphene os

Well pretty much all computers have a backdoor to the CPU. That hasn’t been proven for Pixel phones though.

I fucking hate Google and wouldn’t use any of their (proprietary) software, but Pixel phones are amazing. Hear me out, Google is the only phone manufacturer right now, that puts extensive hardware security features like MTE, a secure element, as well as a bunch of others in their phones. The Google Titan M2 is based on an open-source project called OpenTitan, and Google has even contributed their own changes upstream. It’s based on the open RISC-V architecture, and it’s the most complete and secure implementation of a secure element that you can find in an Android phone. The only thing that comes even close is the “Secure Enclave” in Apple ARM chips, that are used in modern iPhones, iPads and Macs. I understand the concern about a potential backdoor in the firmware, but that’s a valid concern with basically every CPU on the market right now. x86 are ARM are completely proprietary, so you can’t really trust any CPU based on one of these architectures. The old Google Titan M1 was based on ARM, Apple’s Secure Enclave is also based on ARM, as well as Snapdragon’s SPU (which is incomplete and insecure anyway). The Titan M2, being based on open hardware architecture and firmware, is the most trustworthy secure element, despite being made by Google. It includes features like Insider Attack Resistance, support for the Weaver API, Android StrongBox hardware keystore implementation and is used for a secure implementation of Android Verified Boot. GrapheneOS is free, open-source, and doesn’t use any proprietary Google apps/services by default. Although I hate Google, a Pixel with GrapheneOS is currently the best option for a secure smartphone.

Here, you forgot this: \

And Mozilla main source of income is… Google.

This is bad, very bad.

There’s safari and pale moon

There are more options than GrapheneOS with broader device support, such as Calyx or LineageOS.

But if you use Android already, you can start by using F-Droid (or others) to install apps to find FOSS replacements for apps you use.

For ease of use Apple might be the most convenient alternative to Google. At least for smartphones.

There is also Lineage OS. It’s not as secure but it is compatible with the most amount of devices.

Isn’t proton photos built into their Proton Drive already? It’s implementation is… barebones… On Android but it works.

Or if you have the skills you can selfhost Immich which is an excellent replacement for Google Photos.

This to me sounds like an issue with hardware video decoding not working right and it falling back to software decoding on the CPU.

As part of our company’s security policy, our IT admin disallows firefox to be installed in dev machine.

our engineers cannot test their work in firefox.

LOL

I’ve yet to find more than a handful of pages that have had issues, and most were fairly poorly coded to begin with

Just make sure it isn’t the Pomeranians this time