LibreWolf

★★★★☆

Customized Firefox, with an eye toward security and privacy. Follows the stable release channel so it’s usually up to date. (Waterfox follows the extended-support releases.) Differences seem to mostly be in default settings (like clearing site data when you close the browser), pre-installed uBlock Origin, plus some security hardening: primarily disabling or altering features that can leak data usable to identify your browser.

Upside: better privacy! From what I can tell, LibreWolf and Brave are comparable in terms of browsing privacy, but of course LibreWolf doesn’t have Brave’s crypto, ads and AI bloat.

Downside: Sites that rely on, say, WebGL, or DRM’d video, or reading Canvas, may not work right (or at all). I’ve only had trouble so far with Panoramax (which needs WebGL) and uploading to Flickr (which might be a Flatpak thing since it also happens with Waterfox). I do find it annoying that anti-fingerprinting blocks auto-switching between light and dark mode. (It’s also worth considering your threat model and the fact that small projects still depend on Mozilla for finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and not all the documentation has been updated to refer or link to LibreWolf.)

Otherwise the experience is very much like using Firefox.

Sync and Extensions

LibreWolf can sync settings and bookmarks through Firefox Sync. That seems like a weird choice for a privacy-focused fork, but the data is encrypted before uploading, so Mozilla shouldn’t be able to read your sync data even if they wanted to. Though if you use other Firefox-based browsers and sync through the same account, you might end up with a weird mix of settings. I already use Floccus (which lets you bring your own storage) to sync bookmarks with other browsers (including Chromium ones), and it works just fine on here.

LibreWolf is compatible with all Firefox Add-ons, but they recommend just installing a password manager and nothing else. Extensions can increase your attack surface, and sites can look for specific add-ons and use the list of which ones they find to identify you.

As for password managers, they recommend KeePassXC-Browser or BitWarden. I use KeePassXC, but it takes a little effort to get it working with KeePassXC-Browser. Flatpak makes it more complicated, and I haven’t managed to get it to work yet.

Availability and Updates

Windows has an installer with an optional auto-updater. For macOS they actually recommend HomeBrew - there’s a disk image, but it doesn’t auto-update. For Linux they have a few repositories you can add for systems based on Fedora, Debian, Arch etc., plus a Flatpak. And it’s available for all three platforms on both Intel and ARM.

There’s no mobile version, though they recommend IronFox for Android. I’ll have to give that a try sometime.