From Firefox to Librewolf

Zucca · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:44 am Post subject: From Firefox to Librewolf

It looks like Librewolf has been getting more and more popular among users here. Since they provide their official Gentoo overlay, it's really easy to start using it.

Few questions:

Is there an esr version of Librewolf?
Do the Firefox extensions work on Librewolf?
... is Librewolf slightly lighter in resource usage, as all the Mozilla "services" has been removed from it?

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bstaletic · Guru Joined: 05 Apr 2014 Posts: 452

No ESR version of librewolf. There's librewolf and librewolf-bin, both tracking firefox:rapid.
Firefox extensions work.
I have not paid attention to resource consumption difference.

I'll add that librewolf maintainers are very responsive regarding bug reports from gentoo users.
Though I have the impression there's only one maintainer for the ebuilds.

EDIT: typo

pa4wdh · l33t Joined: 16 Dec 2005 Posts: 893

Interesting poll.
I'm now using firefox, but mozilla's recent choices make me curious for other browsers, and i'm interested to read some experiences.

The only downside i can think of:
Products with $evil removed never really succeed in completely removing $evil. For example all "de-googled" android versions, quite often there are still parts of the phone's functions that use google somewhere.
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eeckwrk99 · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 5:24 pm Post subject:

Firefox + arkenfox as far as I'm concerned. I don't really see the point of Librewolf.

keet · Guru Joined: 09 Sep 2008 Posts: 574

I switched to LibreWolf partly because my company discourages using Firefox because it's supposedly insecure (because it doesn't let Microsoft or Google spy on everything we do?).

I've been using LibreWolf on my Gentoo computers, too, and it seems to work fine. The defaults were a bit more privacy-oriented than I preferred (no automatic filling of username and password fields), but other than that, it's OK, and I haven't noticed any problems.

bstaletic · Guru Joined: 05 Apr 2014 Posts: 452

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20557

Neither (I'd rather something else). Yes (because not Chrome), and No (the web should be turned off). :)

Is it Librewolf that's "hostile" to Gentoo and partly the reason it isn't in ::gentoo?

Zucca · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 9:00 pm Post subject:

Well.
I started librewolf compilation. I'll start testing it.
I certainly hope I can simply import my existing profile from Firefox to Librewolf. Otherwise It'll be quite a job to switch.

I enabled lto and disabled jumbo-build... I guess I'll start testing after some 10hours or so. ;P
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Zucca · Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2025 11:39 am Post subject:

Well. First things I noticed:

seems to store configs and everything in ~/.librewolf
- ... the same affect firefox too *sigh*
wasn't unable to import bookmarks automatically
uses gtk window decorations, not my compositor native
- didn't found a setting to change this at first glance
so much less default clutter <3

EDIT: Also Scrolling is way smoother. This is unexpected, as I bluntly imported the profile from Firefox (thus most of the "harmful settings" are still active).
Plan right now is to start a fresh profile, then move passwords to an external utility like app-admin/pass, then save bookmarks and maybe the list of open tabs too (I have a problem with open tabs... three windows... loads of tabs).
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