LibreWolf- a new fork of Firefox

[crosscourt]

More here, https://itsfoss.com/librewolf/

[tlmiller]

Eh, not exactly NEW...they've been talking about it's benefits and drawbacks after actively using it on the Endeavour forums for 6+ months now...

[wove]

What is the consensus on the Endeavor forums about LibreWolf?

It looks very similar in its intentions to WaterFox. WaterFox however does include the ability to sync with Mozilla.

I often wonder why forks of Firefox are open source across the board as far as I know, while most forks of Chrome/Chromium are proprietary developed by companies. I was reading a piece this morning, where the author was slamming Mozilla for Pocket integration and adding ads. He said he felt he had no choice but to move to Brave. It made no sense to me.

[tlmiller]

Those that like it generally feel the only downside is the fact that it's compile times are rather large if you install instead of librewolf-bin.

Others are of the opinion that it's a great idea, but that it's not really all that necessary. I don't know anyone who's said they have issues with it, or that there's anyone who's used it that didn't like it. It's still totally compatible with everything Firefox (thus the major difference to Waterfox).

I haven't PERSONALLY tried it.

[wove]

I have not tried Waterfox or LibreWolf. I have no clue what Mozilla is up to, and Firefox does seem to be floundering. Personally I do not see that Firefox is doing anything egregious and I have never felt any need to move to a clone of it. Does Debian still ship with a Firefox clone (IceWeasel?) because of some horrid thing that Firefox did?

[crosscourt]

Its interesting though that many see Firefox floundering because most of the surveys include all users Windows,etc. Many surveys that show the preferences of open source users show Firefox as the most used browser.

[tlmiller]

I have not tried Waterfox or LibreWolf. I have no clue what Mozilla is up to, and Firefox does seem to be floundering. Personally I do not see that Firefox is doing anything egregious and I have never felt any need to move to a clone of it. Does Debian still ship with a Firefox clone (IceWeasel?) because of some horrid thing that Firefox did?

No, Debian moved back to Firefox-esr with the release of Stretch I believe. I personally set up SID in my repos and then configure apt pinning to keep anything but Firefox from installing from SID so that I can have the current release instead of the LTS release of Firefox (it does require a few other packages so that it sometimes requires a -t sid to install it, and I'm cool with that).

Waterfox was...meh. It attempted to keep the old plugin capability with newer Firefox features, and while it was mostly successful, it was IMO very clunky, and was rather outdated by the time they released a version.

I installed the LibreWolf flatpak on my work computer just to look at it, and it really does look exactly like Firefox, picked up all my installed Firefox extensions, etc. So it's much more like "normal" Firefox than Waterfox ever was. It was v94.0-1, so was only a single minor patch version behind (Firefox is 94.0-2) normal Firefox.

[chris]

I got fed up with my old(er) extensions stopping working.
Palemoon kept them going for a time but i started getting messages that they weren't supported.
I tried Waterfox-Classic as it said it could use old extensions. It does (mainly) and is being kept current by the maintainer. Happy with it so far.