this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
431 points (79.6% liked)
Technology
73972 readers
4069 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm more worried about the updates not happening in a timely fashion. Is it just a passion project by a handful of devs, or is there some kind of funding?
Update frequency/latency hasn't been an issue in the 2 years I've been using it.
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolf
Sure, but what about in 2 years from now?
I used IronFox for a couple years and it suddenly stopped getting updates, and it took me a few months to realize and switch to something else. I don't want that to happen again.
I like the idea of librewolf, especially that it's just a patch set on top of Firefox, but someone needs to maintain that patch set. This would be fine for simpler software, but browsers are complex and I just worry that updates will stall out with little warning.
Certainly a valid concern, but it's true with any software. I think enough people (techies especially) are using LibreWolf that a lack of updates would be visible quickly.
Perhaps. But a browser is something I'd prefer to just forget about and not track updates. So it's very likely that I won't check if it has gotten updates for a few months.
Two years is enough time for Firefox itself to cease to exist. Cross that bridge when you burn it
Maybe? It's a lot less likely for FF to disappear than LibreWolf.
Agreed. But it's still too far of a timeframe to be worried about imo
Yeah, perhaps I'll try it out. I've made most of the changes they did in my config though.
Do you use Firefox sync already?
Yup. Switching won't be a big deal.
Librewolf has sync disabled, but if you enable that it's as easy as signing in. If it goes to shit like you're worried about, you still have it syncing
I'm not worried about data loss. Honestly, the only feature I actually care about from sync is open tabs and recent history, since I'll often open something on one device that I was using on another. I don't really use bookmarks or saved passwords.
My main concern is security. I don't want my machines to be susceptible to malware, and with browsers being very complex, I want to make sure the dev team is very responsive in shipping security updates.
The main reason I use IronFox on my phone is that it works with FDroid, which is important because I don't have Google Play running on my main profile (I use GapheneOS). If the flatpak is updated within a few days of Firefox consistently, that's good enough. But if it takes weeks or more, that's too much.
They've been on point so far as far as I know
as I understand their build system is automatic. updates are not, but they have an update checker companion thing, and flathub too can manage that if you install from there
I’m not a contributor to LibreWolf so I can’t speak with authority on it but I can’t imagine that they are so different from Firefox that they wouldn’t be able to just merge 99% of updates from FF with minimal effort.
From looking at the repo, it looks like it's simply a set of patches that get applied to the Firefox source code. They don't maintain a fork, just a set of changes that get applied before building.