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.
I will not trust a site that recommends Brave as a secure browser. I’m no security expert, but for a long time Brave proved they’re shady and I can’t trust them. Also, for mobile browsers I can’t see any recommendation of a firefox-based one, which is a shame.
They used to recommend Mull (firefox-based) before it died.
I agree on Brave, and I also avoid it so as not to solidify the chromium browser dominance any further.
However, from all I have read, Firefox Mobile based browsers truly are less secure from a technological standpoint. I think for most people, Firefox Mobile is secure enough for it not to be enough of a deciding factor to use a chromium browser, but objectively it is worse. Mull was making the best of that despite the downsides, so hopefully the IronFox fork succeeds on mobile.
And despite their recommending Brave, I think the arguments against LibreWolf do have some merit.
Sadly Firefox has no tab sandboxing on mobile so yeah, it is less secure.
And while I agree the Brave company is shady, the browser has good security features.
There’s Vanadium and Cromite which have ad-blocking and strong security and none of the problems Brave has barring Chromium monopoly
After the drama around the privacy guides website(s) and the people who maintain them fighting for control, I cannot trust them.
People who seek to control something because it gives them power over a narrative should not be trusted.
On default settings, Firefox’s news feed is suspiciously similar to the stuff I browse, so I don’t trust it at all for privacy without Arkenfox. I like how LibreWolf strips all of that out by default but still lets me loosen the settings so I can install add-ons and keep data I want stored, which I’m not sure that Mullvad browser does. If it’s getting behind on updates though, that would be disappointing, although right now the LW Flatpak is on a newer version of FF than Fedora FF. Mullvad browser is better for anonymity though.
@ProdigalFrog I recently started learning about the potential issues with using forks. So while I still use and love Librewolf, I have my eye on Phoenix as a possible future browser to move to instead…
I just looked into using Phoenix but after reading some valid criticisms of the project, along with the pain of setting it up and keeping it updated, it didn’t feel worth it for me.
And to be clear, Phoenix is not a browser, it is a Firefox config.
According to their intructions, it would seem it’s trivial to install and receive updates on the supported linux distros:
By default, Phoenix is installed & updated via your operating system’s package manager. This allows for fast, easy updates & fixes as needed, right with the rest of your system!
Windows isn’t support though, so it would be a far more manual process there.
Cheers for mentioning that, I hadn’t heard of Phoenix, but looks like an excellent alternative.
I just learned the dev of Phoenix forked Mull! It’s called IronFox (https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox) and has a F-Droid repo. I’m pumped on this, thanks a bunch for highlighting all this and to the original commenter for providing the link to Phoenix!
