This is unrelated, but I've never had the opportunity to ask before: in what cultures is it common to put a space before a colon (e.g. "Librefox : Browse With Freedom")? When I see that behavior, I immediately know the author isn't a native English speaker, but I've never known the reason behind it.
Since we're on the subject, saying "a French" sounds wrong to me (American native English speaker), even though the same construction is OK for other nationalities. (E.g. "a German" is OK.) You're better off with "a Frenchman"/"a Frenchwoman" or "a French person".
Interesting. That's always irked me but I passed it off as a typo or some personal preference. I wonder what other typographical differences are due to culture that I passed off as something else.
I love the total unrelated pieces of trivia you can find on the comments.
I know about the "Oxford comma" (I think that's how is called), as they taught me to never put a comma and a conjunction in a list of things and the two spaces after a sentence...
Yup, above it's a case of missing "Oxford comma"... ^__^;
i am open to any collaboration but i think the projects scopes are different where Librefox main idea is to stick to Firefox latest release and Waterfox wants to keep legacy extensions
Firefox has been and continues to be libre in the sense of software freedom -- free to run, inspect, share, and modify. Anyone who complains about how Mozilla runs their variant of Firefox should thank Mozilla for that licensing choice so that with other people's hard work, the world has multiple variants to choose from all of which are also free software (as far as I know).
You won't see such improvements for non-free (proprietary) software because it wouldn't be legal to prepare or distribute them and because modifying binaries is remarkably difficult. Any improvements the proprietor distributes are untrustworthy unless they are freed. I think it's great that software freedom exists and that people are willing and able to distribute variants that serve their needs.
Weird to see "better privacy and security" listed when the notes say that it's not safe to use it with Tor. I assume it's just a compatibility issue with extensions or something, but still...
Bummer that the performance for videos and stuff is apparently worse. I assume it's because the developer doesn't have access to the PGO/LTCG resources that are used for official Firefox builds, but maybe hardware video playback has to be disabled for privacy reasons? The readme doesn't seem to say why it's slow.
"Weird to see "better privacy and security" listed when the notes say that it's not safe to use it with Tor. I assume it's just a compatibility issue with extensions or something, but still..."
I'm guessing it lacks some of the more obnoxious features used by the Tor Browser bundle, such as the nag dialog when you change the window size.
That particular window geometry being common for all tor users may be a good way to keep your browser fingerprint anonymous, but I wager that screen geometry for general internet access is less common than [fullscreen on whatever common size of screen you own.] I suspect that if your traffic isn't coming out of a known tor exit node, you're better off using a normal window geometry.
Except when do you ever use the browser at actual full screen? Your window decorations, desktop environment, and browser UI cruft reduce the viewport size by a few tens of pixels.
And if you do use actual full screen, that's probably even more uniquely-identifying!
>Except when do you ever use the browser at actual full screen?
Almost always, maybe I'm weird like that...
>"Your window decorations, desktop environment"
For most people the signal that gets through will be "windows" or "mac". Anybody else may benefit from sending the "window geometry typically used by the tor browser but not coming from a known tor exit node" signal. Maybe.
>"and browser UI cruft "
That an interesting point, does enabling or disabling the bookmarks toolbar trigger the window geometry nag dialog in the Tor Browser bundle?
Right, so you're definitely producing a very unusual fingerprint in terms of browser dimensions. Yours is exactly the kind of use case that the Tor browser nag popup is supposed to help.
I wager my "fullscreen on a particular mac" signal is less unique than the "tor browser bundle size but not coming from a tor exit node" signal. Because what browser other than the tor browser uses that geometry? And how many people using that geometry aren't coming through a known tor exit node? I wager the haystack you'd be putting yourself in by doing this is vanishingly small.
Thank you for your feedback it's appreciated, Tor compatibility description on the readme have been updated for the matter :) the recommendation was written before having a Librefox-TBB version. Tor works better with Librefox-TBB (Tor) version and classic version is not meant to be torrified even if tor settings are enabled, this is because of the Librefox-tor-addons, they are not included in the classic version for obvious reasons but are bundled in Librefox-TBB (Tor)
We do not recommend connecting over Tor on Librefox classic version (because of the missing Librefox-Tor-Addons, they are only included in the tor version for obvious reasons), use instead Librefox-Tor version if your threat model calls for it, or for accessing hidden services (Thus said tor settings have been enabled since v2 on all Librefox versions for user toriffying/proxifying their entire connection).
I see they add a plugin to add a refresh button to the URL bar. But I have that on my Firefox without an addon. Is there a new version that removed this button moving forward or something?
The refresh addon, add a refresh button inside the URL-bar next to the screenshot/page-action/bookmark button on the old version of Firefox the refresh button was there and now it moved to the icons bar... having it in the URL-bar leave more space for other extensions and some users prefer the refresh in the URL-bar :)
But as the OP stated it's already there by default. I don't have that plugin yet I see a reload icon in my Firefox. So I'm like the OP, wondering what the point of that plugin is.
Looks like opencl answered our question. I guess I don't mind them being merged / separate. The one thing I do mind about Firefox is the stupid gaps they ad next to the address bar. I always have to remove those, they make no sense, and even this fork ditched them.
Thank you for the clarification, I like the UI of this browser, maybe it can get adopted officially by ParrotSec OS, looks like they customize Firefox a bit as it is, you may be saving them a bit of effort.
Probably not. Mozilla will chime in sooner or later. They had a problem with Debian distributing a modified version of Firefox and ended up forcing Debian to call it something different - Iceweasel. Everything got sorted out years later.
