I agree. It's lame, difficult to pronounce, and clearly identifies the project as something that only RMS-level uber-nerds would care about. Terrible name.
I tried to watch WWF in Puerto Rico the 90s but just didn't understand why all my friends liked it. I still don't. I did play the games back then though, those were more fun than watching the show. I never even bothered with Lucha Libre tbh.
Judging by the commit logs, the main two maintainers are one anonymous guy (nothing linking his profile to a real person) and some Chinese guy (is he a Chinese national or not?)
Although these may be perfectly well-meaning people, we can't just trust them to maintain something so critical as a web browser.
I fully respect peoples' right to anonymity, but such projects need at least one core maintainer to be an identifiable person, imo. Just to establish trust and accountability in case anything does happen.
I hope this is not taken the wrong way and that you understand what I'm getting at here.
Social accountability, for one. Never underestimate shame as a motivating factor for humans. I'm generally in favor of protecting anonymity, so I'm not fully in agreement that this should be a hard requirement for a software project, but I can at least see the appeal of the idea.
Web browsers are also a rare class of software with high complexity and also high privilege (considering the data that typically passes through them), so perhaps higher scrutiny of this class of software is warranted.
An anonymous individual might also have multiple anonymous accounts, for example. Without that anonymity, other projects might ban their contributions, and users might not use their software.
If "being a Chinese national" is an argument for "not trustworthy", I'm sorry but "being an American national" also becomes an argument for "not trustworthy". By about 400% more (and I'm being nice).
I didn't see any others. I'm not quite clear where you're getting this idea that either of these people are PRC nationals either, or why that would really matter. The PRC is huge in the FOSS space, and it's not like I'm a huge fan of the country (I live in Taiwan) but credit where it's due.
Many of the browsers you mentioned above are basically Firefox reskins with better settings out of the box.
I downloaded WebLibre out of curiosity and can say it's different from those other browsers. I've never seen a mobile browser that lets you run Tor-enabled private tabs, or mobile-friendly multi-account containers. The UI also bears nearly no semblance to Firefox (besides the rendering engine, only the extension management area reminds me of it).
Is it? They say it’s using Gecko + Mozilla Android Components. Which would probably make it similar to FF in many ways, but not a fork. I didn’t look further into it though (as I want FF, especially Mozilla sync)
Interesting. Just one hour ago, I was removing the Amazon & co links that Firefox imposes to users on the home page.
I was recommending Firefox to my friend to avoid a weather app's ads. Turns out he got ads on Firefox too. Removing them is easy in the settings but not for the general public.
The question though is : where will the funds of WebLibre come ? Implementing a browser is hard. If Firefox continues to drift, who will pay for the development of the engine ?
The .eu in the domain lets me think this is a european project, but I wasn't able to find a "about us" page.
There's maybe a couple dozen forks of FireFox or other Chromium-based browsers out there. Probably more, but certainly enough that this headline made me give a slight eyeroll, thinking "another one, huh? OK, so what's actually different here?"
Who pays for it? Many are FOSS projects, specially where privacy is concerned. Plain old FireFox still tracks telemetry, which is more than some people like. People hate being tracked and having their every thought examined for its advertising potential to the point that people build privacy-focused browsers for free as a public good.
Sometimes donations work as well, like how the Tor project works. But Tor is running servers, so their financial needs are much heavier.
I can't set Google as my auto complete provider. It's not on the list.
I was able to set Google as default search engine but had to go to a separate blank search page and type it out.
It would've been nice if Google was in the main list.
Runs a local AI model for suggesting tab and container names. It supports tab containers.
Suggests you to install ublock origin on first step itself.
There's tor, tree view tabs and duck duck go styled bangs synced from a number of repos.
I admit that was definitely tongue in cheek.
But brave is on the front page. Maybe they're better.
I would like to keep my data from bad actors with illegal ops or malware, but willing to sacrifice some to a legitimate corporation with data protection rules set up for a better personalized experience. I guess chrome with ublock origin lite is all I need.
Is this browser exclusively for the .1% that will not even load a google web page?
I doubt even 0.1% manage to avoid loading a google page or script while browsing the web, but there is a lot of momentum behind the (apparently herculean) effort to reduce the presence of google in one's life to the greatest practical degree.
What we really need is to declare Chrome public utility and national security critical. Then have a steering committee and open transparent development that benefits users first. This goes in hand with Chrome being taken away from Google, as have been recently announced.
How current is this still? Asking as a complete noob. I don't expect Firefox's architecture to have changed much, but it's been 3 years, so it could have improved a lot since this was written, and there are things I know about that are outdated in this document.
For instance, the two mentioned Linux sandbox escapes [1] involve two things that have disappeared in many setups: X11 and pulseaudio. We now have Wayland and pipewire, which should both be better in this aspect IIUC. The mentioned bug related to X11 was also closed 3 years ago.
Firefox Development is essentially dead. Mozilla fucked us over collectively.
Sure this particular bug has been fixed but Firefox Security is nothing compared to the Millions Google is paying to ensure security. Just the amount of paid, full time eyeballs on chromium security alone makes a huge difference.
Maybe all of this is true, but it's a different threat model than I'm concerned with. I'm not that worried about malware exploits, I'm far more worried about software behaving "correctly" in a user-hostile manner.
Not really sure what the point of this is. As others have said, there is already an abundance of privacy focused Firefox forks on Android. I think Ladybird is where the future of user respecting web browsing is at.
Naming things matters and if FireFox had been called WebLibre or LibreBrowser it would have been far less appealing.
There’s just something lame about it and it’s too many syllables, same deal with XLibre.
It's even more lame when you're French.
Joke aside, I agree with you, the "libre" suffix/prefix carries some undertones of "it's going to be old and ugly but open source".
It is added to the growing list of Firefox forks on Android
- Iceraven
- Fennec
- Waterfox
- Tor
- IronFox
- Firefox Focus (By Mozilla itself)
Any others?
Judging by the commit logs, the main two maintainers are one anonymous guy (nothing linking his profile to a real person) and some Chinese guy (is he a Chinese national or not?)
Although these may be perfectly well-meaning people, we can't just trust them to maintain something so critical as a web browser.
I fully respect peoples' right to anonymity, but such projects need at least one core maintainer to be an identifiable person, imo. Just to establish trust and accountability in case anything does happen.
I hope this is not taken the wrong way and that you understand what I'm getting at here.
You’ve been heard, and accordingly Google will now demand ID or boot them out of the Play Store!
Kidding, not until next year :)
What sort of accountability can be gained by knowing someone’s identity in a case like that?
Web browsers are also a rare class of software with high complexity and also high privilege (considering the data that typically passes through them), so perhaps higher scrutiny of this class of software is warranted.
An anonymous individual might also have multiple anonymous accounts, for example. Without that anonymity, other projects might ban their contributions, and users might not use their software.
Yes it's not a name and face, but I can understand wanting to maintain separation between government identity and online identity
Here's another Ironfox dev: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsaky/
I didn't see any others. I'm not quite clear where you're getting this idea that either of these people are PRC nationals either, or why that would really matter. The PRC is huge in the FOSS space, and it's not like I'm a huge fan of the country (I live in Taiwan) but credit where it's due.
I downloaded WebLibre out of curiosity and can say it's different from those other browsers. I've never seen a mobile browser that lets you run Tor-enabled private tabs, or mobile-friendly multi-account containers. The UI also bears nearly no semblance to Firefox (besides the rendering engine, only the extension management area reminds me of it).
https://docs.weblibre.eu/Personal-Local-Search-Engine
I was recommending Firefox to my friend to avoid a weather app's ads. Turns out he got ads on Firefox too. Removing them is easy in the settings but not for the general public.
The question though is : where will the funds of WebLibre come ? Implementing a browser is hard. If Firefox continues to drift, who will pay for the development of the engine ?
The .eu in the domain lets me think this is a european project, but I wasn't able to find a "about us" page.
Who pays for it? Many are FOSS projects, specially where privacy is concerned. Plain old FireFox still tracks telemetry, which is more than some people like. People hate being tracked and having their every thought examined for its advertising potential to the point that people build privacy-focused browsers for free as a public good.
Sometimes donations work as well, like how the Tor project works. But Tor is running servers, so their financial needs are much heavier.
Some settings are not self-explaining, for example "improve built-in query stripping".
I suppose that's to be expected for an alpha.
Not being able to add a custom search engine URL (at least as far as I can tell) is unfortunately what will make me not use this browser.
Runs a local AI model for suggesting tab and container names. It supports tab containers.
Suggests you to install ublock origin on first step itself.
There's tor, tree view tabs and duck duck go styled bangs synced from a number of repos.
I would like to keep my data from bad actors with illegal ops or malware, but willing to sacrifice some to a legitimate corporation with data protection rules set up for a better personalized experience. I guess chrome with ublock origin lite is all I need.
Is this browser exclusively for the .1% that will not even load a google web page?
For instance, the two mentioned Linux sandbox escapes [1] involve two things that have disappeared in many setups: X11 and pulseaudio. We now have Wayland and pipewire, which should both be better in this aspect IIUC. The mentioned bug related to X11 was also closed 3 years ago.
[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492
Sure this particular bug has been fixed but Firefox Security is nothing compared to the Millions Google is paying to ensure security. Just the amount of paid, full time eyeballs on chromium security alone makes a huge difference.