Naming things matters and if FireFox had been called WebLibre or LibreBrowser it would have been far less appealing.
There’s just something lame about it and it’s too many syllables, same deal with XLibre.
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".
Don't mind the "Libre" too much tbh, because I use some quality products that use it ... but yes, it's only a matter of time before marketing nerds ruin an already unappealing term
It is added to the growing list of Firefox forks on Android
- Iceraven
- Fennec
- Waterfox
- Tor
- IronFox
- Firefox Focus (By Mozilla itself)
Any others?
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.
You’ve been heard, and accordingly Google will now demand ID or boot them out of the Play Store!
Kidding, not until next year :)
Yes it's not a name and face, but I can understand wanting to maintain separation between government identity and online identity
Here's another Ironfox dev: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsaky/
I didn't see any others. I'm not quite clear where you're getting this idea that either of these people are PRC nationals either, or why that would really matter. The PRC is huge in the FOSS space, and it's not like I'm a huge fan of the country (I live in Taiwan) but credit where it's due.
What sort of accountability can be gained by knowing someone’s identity in a case like that?
But you can trust any random guy to maintain Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge. /s
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).
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...
Sure this particular bug has been fixed but Firefox Security is nothing compared to the Millions Google is paying to ensure security. Just the amount of paid, full time eyeballs on chromium security alone makes a huge difference.
I was recommending Firefox to my friend to avoid a weather app's ads. Turns out he got ads on Firefox too. Removing them is easy in the settings but not for the general public.
The question though is : where will the funds of WebLibre come ? Implementing a browser is hard. If Firefox continues to drift, who will pay for the development of the engine ?
The .eu in the domain lets me think this is a european project, but I wasn't able to find a "about us" page.
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.
Runs a local AI model for suggesting tab and container names. It supports tab containers.
Suggests you to install ublock origin on first step itself.
There's tor, tree view tabs and duck duck go styled bangs synced from a number of repos.
I would like to keep my data from bad actors with illegal ops or malware, but willing to sacrifice some to a legitimate corporation with data protection rules set up for a better personalized experience. I guess chrome with ublock origin lite is all I need.
Is this browser exclusively for the .1% that will not even load a google web page?
Why stop here ? Microsoft, Meta and Apple products are also "public utility and national security critical". /s
If yes, I'll try it out.
I primarily use Pale Moon, and CloudFlare blocks me from a bunch of websites, because I don't provide enough tracking data to convince them I'm not a bot.
well, I didn't see that combination of words coming
Anyway, I wish the headline had specified "... for Android"
Some settings are not self-explaining, for example "improve built-in query stripping".
I suppose that's to be expected for an alpha.
Not being able to add a custom search engine URL (at least as far as I can tell) is unfortunately what will make me not use this browser.
