WebLibre: The Privacy-Focused Browser

> There’s just something lame about it

It's even more lame when you're French.

Joke aside, I agree with you, the "libre" suffix/prefix carries some undertones of "it's going to be old and ugly but open source".

I agree. It's lame, difficult to pronounce, and clearly identifies the project as something that only RMS-level uber-nerds would care about. Terrible name.

>IronFox

Judging by the commit logs, the main two maintainers are one anonymous guy (nothing linking his profile to a real person) and some Chinese guy (is he a Chinese national or not?)

Although these may be perfectly well-meaning people, we can't just trust them to maintain something so critical as a web browser.

I fully respect peoples' right to anonymity, but such projects need at least one core maintainer to be an identifiable person, imo. Just to establish trust and accountability in case anything does happen.

I hope this is not taken the wrong way and that you understand what I'm getting at here.

Many of the browsers you mentioned above are basically Firefox reskins with better settings out of the box.

I downloaded WebLibre out of curiosity and can say it's different from those other browsers. I've never seen a mobile browser that lets you run Tor-enabled private tabs, or mobile-friendly multi-account containers. The UI also bears nearly no semblance to Firefox (besides the rendering engine, only the extension management area reminds me of it).

Is it? They say it’s using Gecko + Mozilla Android Components. Which would probably make it similar to FF in many ways, but not a fork. I didn’t look further into it though (as I want FF, especially Mozilla sync)

[dead]

It’s a German company behind it, probably a one man show: https://docs.weblibre.eu/Legal/Imprint

There's maybe a couple dozen forks of FireFox or other Chromium-based browsers out there. Probably more, but certainly enough that this headline made me give a slight eyeroll, thinking "another one, huh? OK, so what's actually different here?"

Who pays for it? Many are FOSS projects, specially where privacy is concerned. Plain old FireFox still tracks telemetry, which is more than some people like. People hate being tracked and having their every thought examined for its advertising potential to the point that people build privacy-focused browsers for free as a public good.

Sometimes donations work as well, like how the Tor project works. But Tor is running servers, so their financial needs are much heavier.

You may be missing the point of this browser.

How current is this still? Asking as a complete noob. I don't expect Firefox's architecture to have changed much, but it's been 3 years, so it could have improved a lot, and there are things I know about that are outdated in this document.

For instance, the two mentioned Linux sandbox escapes [1] involve two things that have disappeared in many setups: X11 and pulseaudio. We now have Wayland and pipewire, which should both be better in this aspect IIUC. The mentioned bug related to X11 was also closed 3 years ago.

[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492

Also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Exactly what I was thinking: a modern privacy first proposal may be better suited with starting from chromium, even if it hurts feelings

Even if it's not on topic, that post is quite interesting.

Maybe all of this is true, but it's a different threat model than I'm concerned with. I'm not that worried about malware exploits, I'm far more worried about software behaving "correctly" in a user-hostile manner.