LibreWolf
â â â â â
Customized Firefox, with an eye toward security and privacy. Follows the stable release channel so itâs 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 doesnât have Braveâs crypto, ads and AI bloat.
Downside: Sites that rely on, say, WebGL, or DRMâd video, or reading Canvas, may not work right (or at all). Iâve 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. (Itâs 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 shouldnât 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. Iâve been able to get natively-installed packages on Linux and macOS to talk to KeePass just by linking the user config files mentioned there. But Flatpak makes it more complicated, and I havenât 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. (Thereâs a disk image too, but it doesnât auto-update.) Even then, you need to add --no-quarantine
when installing or upgrading the cask, or else the system will decide the new version is âdamagedâ and refuse to run it. (Itâs a small team, and the app isnât signed with a paid Apple Developer account.) Yes, this does limit the audience that might want to run LibreWolf on macOS to those who are also comfortable with installing and running an extra command-line based package manager.
For Linux they have a few repositories you can add for systems based on Fedora, Debian, Arch etc., plus a Flatpak.
And itâs available for all three platforms on both Intel and ARM.
Thereâs no mobile version, though they recommend IronFox for Android.