From Firefox to Librewolf

[Zucca]

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?
  • I've used esr version of Firefox from when it was established.
• Do the Firefox extensions work on Librewolf?
• ... is Librewolf slightly lighter in resource usage, as all the Mozilla "services" has been removed from it?

[bstaletic]

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]

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.

[eeckwrk99]

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

[keet]

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]

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

Arkenfox is perfectly fine, but one should be following arkenfox development and updating the config as firefox evolves.
I chose librewolf so I don't have to do that. Yes, I understand there's a tradeoff there.

[pjp]

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?

Since they provide their official Gentoo overlay, it's really easy to start using it.

I had some version of it installed for a while, but I got tired of pushing multiple squashfs images of different repos around. Automating that was never a priority, so I just stopped bothering with it.

Other than having had it installed, I never really used it. If for some reason I had to stop using Firefox, I''d probably try Librewolf because every version of Chrome is the worst browsing experience I've ever had (primarily UI and block blocking).

[Zucca]

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

[Zucca]

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).

[Zucca]

Well. The experience on Librewolf really is much more better than on default Firefox.
It's certainly faster, at scrolling, but that could be because of different *FLAGS but more likely that there has been some progress between esr version of Firefox and the rapid version (which Librewolf is using as a base).

EDIT: Nope. It seem that most custom *FLAGS I had set, were stripped according to emerge --info... Strange, since there isn't custom-cflags USE for librewolf.
According to

Code: Select all

quse custom-cflags | awk '(!seen[$1]++) {print substr($1,1,length($1)-1)}'

... output chromium and seamonkey do have this, but not firefox and librewolf.
Shame kinda... I was hoping that I'd get lto'd build.

[bstaletic]

The librewolf ebuild detects `-flto`, filters it out and then uses mozconf for enabling LTO.

https://codeberg.org/librewolf/gentoo/s ... build#L474

[pjp]

Well. The experience on Librewolf really is much more better than on default Firefox.
It's certainly faster, at scrolling, but that could be because of different *FLAGS but more likely that there has been some progress between esr version of Firefox and the rapid version (which Librewolf is using as a base).

EDIT: Nope. It seem that most custom *FLAGS I had set, were stripped according to emerge --info... Strange, since there isn't custom-cflags USE for librewolf.
According to

Code: Select all

quse custom-cflags | awk '(!seen[$1]++) {print substr($1,1,length($1)-1)}'

... output chromium and seamonkey do have this, but not firefox and librewolf.
Shame kinda... I was hoping that I'd get lto'd build.

I may have to try it to see. I don't perceive esr to be slow. Maybe I'm not a power-scroller. ;)

It may also be that I only have a ridiculous amount of tabs open and avoid ludicrous and plaid (89, 60, and 8 -- the later fluctuates the most, but rarely more than 20). I also use the "tab sleep" add-on, but I'm not sure how much that helps compared to when they're normally inactive.

[Ralphred]

but mozilla's recent choices make me curious for other browsers

Similar, though I wouldn't typify it as "recent", more a compilation of dubiously motivated choices over the last decade.
I stopped using {firefox,librewolf} as my "daily driver" some time back, upstream did something to make it aesthetically offensive to me, so it currently sits around as "a management GUI for ancient username/password combinations", and a fallback for badly written/ancient embedded web interfaces.
I've recently noticed they did something to make it less offensive (I don't know what, it just looks less offensive), and with the recent chrome/chromium changes I've been paying a little more attention to it.
There used to be a palpable delay between FF releases and Librewolf, but if as bstaletic says

both tracking firefox:rapid

is true, and at a rate that isn't glacial, then I'm up for giving LibreWolf another try, I know the days of my favourite extensions are numbered within my current browser choice (Vivaldi), no matter how attached I am to the QOL features it has, if I start seeing adds on youtube again I'll be forced to drop it (the only reason I kicked Falkon to the curb all those years ago).

As much as I might disagree with with mozilla's motivation for certain choices, the need for a viable alternative to chromium in the marketplace (read: why we *need* Gecko) is more important than my personal feelings IMHO, so LibreWolf get points for not "no longer not being evil".

EDIT:
>Be me
>Enable librewolf overlay
>Issue emerge -pv command to check it out
>Has dubiously named "clang" use flag set as dubious default
>Knows it will take more than eight times as long to compile using clang
>Assumes ebuild was written by chatgpt
>Disable overlay
>Opens Vivaldi to share and highlight absurdity

[Zucca]

The librewolf ebuild detects `-flto`, filters it out and then uses mozconf for enabling LTO.

Thanks. This is good to know.

[gorg86]

I didn't have any problems with extensions, there is no ESR version. I didn't monitor resource usage but it feels snappier than Firefox (+lto -pgo).
The ebuild always takes a while to get updated, I noticed the Arch and Windows versions always come out way earlier.