I believe LibreWolf’s defaults are too strict and slow down adoption. Most options are either : all or nothing. No in-between.
Sadly, I believe the default settings are too strict and will slow down adoption by the mass, which would in term bring a better anonymity set.
It’s not a great alternative to Firefox because LibreWolf is just not usable for the daily user: no DRM, no cookies, no history, websites that break… The browser should let the user choose:
- Maximum compatibility (more tracking)
- Mid-option (like a modded firefox but without the annoyances like cookies not being stored, having a fixed size, or forced light-mode/timezone)
- Best privacy (pretty much the current mode)
I find myself forced to edit the default settings which is a huge privacy/fingerprinting risk. If we create ‘settings groups’, yes, the privacy will be hurt, but at least we will be more in each group.
What do you think about this?
LibreWolf works fine for me with the defaults on many websites. If I want to browse a website that uses DRM or has other privacy-hostile mitigations, I can use another browser. It’s not like I’m locked down to one option.
And I’m pretty sure LibreWolf does save history. As for cookies, you can keep them fairly easily. This is all in the options panel, which is very minimal and compact just like Firefox.
I do like your suggestion of settings groups even if it does increase the fingerprinting surface potentially, but I’m afraid the LibreWolf team is already struggling to keep pace. I’m sure if an issue/pull request was started they would consider implementing this.
Perhaps for fingerprinting purposes, you could even have site-specific configurations for everything besides DRM, but I’m unsure if that would be easy to implement.