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Invasive Species (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by Exusia@lemmy.world to c/memes@lemmy.ml

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[–] Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world 31 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Is there anything better about LibreWolf that can’t be achieved by altering Firefox settings?

[–] EherNicht@feddit.org 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.

[+] corbin@infosec.pub -13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Firefox doesn't invade anyone's privacy.

[–] EherNicht@feddit.org 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Sadly, with default settings that’s the case. Partly due to Telemetry being active and Google being the default search engine.

[–] corbin@infosec.pub 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it's pretty well anonymized. It's also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.

[–] EherNicht@feddit.org 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing. I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.

[–] corbin@infosec.pub 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I have informed myself. There is nothing personally-identifiable in the data Mozilla collects in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

Technical data includes information about your Firefox version and language, device operating system and hardware configuration, memory, basic information about crashes and errors, outcome of automated processes like updates and safebrowsing. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs. IP addresses are deleted every 14 days.

[–] EherNicht@feddit.org 0 points 3 months ago

You seem to ignore information collected about you is collected information about you.

[–] EherNicht@feddit.org -1 points 3 months ago

This seems like and IS personally identifiable information….

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? I'm not saying they aren't there, it's just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think we're going to far.

[–] corbin@infosec.pub 9 points 3 months ago

There's a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it's a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

[–] EherNicht@feddit.org 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why then not use Chrome if you are fine with Google?!

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 0 points 3 months ago

Don't misunderstand me saying that Google Search being the default is not a major problem as me saying that I'm cool with Google Search or Google in general. You can change the default search engine. Not every "bad thing" these companies do are an equal level of "badness" if that makes sense. A browser shipping with Google Search as the default search engine is very minor to me. I don't use Google Search unless Duck Duck Go doesn't give me a good answer.
My biggest problem with Chromium based browsers is very specifically their market share and that it effectively allows Google to define how the web works because of it. I think Safari is still it's own thing. Firefox is, of course. But that's it. Even a few years back Edge was it's own thing but it's since switched to Chromium. IE is dead I believe, unless there's still some crazy long term enterprise support release. Opera is Chromium based too, now, but I don't remember when exactly this happened. Chromium is still mostly controlled by Google. That's an absolutely massive share of browsers being controlled by Google. (And even many non-browser programs when you consider Electron uses Chromium.)

Chromium is deprecating manifest v2 and the newer v3 has neutered ad blocking capabilities. In Alphabet's SEC fillings they list ad blocking as a challenge to their revenue. End users can't just flip v2 back on (unless the devs of their browser put work to let them). End users can change their default search engine though. Very easily. Trivially so. Who knows, maybe as a result of that court ruling we'll see browsers forced to have no default search engine in the future. I think that's better, yes, but I really don't think having Google Search as the default is that massive of a concern compared to much of the other shit they're doing.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 months ago

I guess, this is most of the changes they do: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/

There's maybe a handful where I'm not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where it's technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There's not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, there's also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.