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.
@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…
https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix
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!
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:
Windows isn’t support though, so it would be a far more manual process there.
Phoenix is not a browser, is it? AFAIK it’s a similar user.js to Arkenfox… They claim to be better, and have their on comparison, but I don’t know:
https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix/wiki/Comparison
Arkenfox has been like the default user.js for privacy… Perhaps phoenix already is better…