Why I'm switching to Waterfox after more than a year using LibreWolf
Hello! I've been using LibreWolf for about fifteen months, and have really liked many aspects of it. I'm very grateful to the maintainers for managing to produce one of the few decent browser forks. However, I recently decided to switch to Waterfox after an accumulation of repeated annoyances, and I figured I should write a post as one piece of data in case it's useful for the community or maintainers. So here are the two major annoyances that led me to eventually give up on LibreWolf:
- No codesigning. What this means for me as a macOS user is that every time there's an update, homebrew tells me that I won't be able to easily update my browser starting in 3 months; and I have to run an `xattr` command to make the browser executable. Ultimately slightly annoying but not (yet) a dealbreaker by itself. If there really is no similarly-easy upgrade path starting in September, that would be a borderline dealbreaker for me.
- My settings, especially those around forgetting history and cookies at the end of a browser session, repeatedly getting overwritten after updates. I think this happened at least four times over the last year. It's totally cool that the browser has default settings that optimize for privacy over convenience, but in my personal workflow the tradeoff for these specific settings isn't worth it for me. It's a fine default, but if a user explicitly changes it, it's likely not the right tradeoff for them, and not respecting that is liable to waste their time and goodwill unnecessarily: Every time this setting changed on an update, I'd have to spend 20 minutes signing into maybe 20 web sites.
Seeing the September deadline from Homebrew approaching slowly had me wondering if I should explore other browsers, and then yesterday the settings issue happened again, and that was the last straw. LibreWolf has some privacy features I'll miss in Waterfox, but for my personal preferences, it just isn't worth the extra effort and uncertainty.
There have been a few other annoyances over the last year (e.g. the initial rollout of the WebGL blocking was annoying, though it's now a feature I appreciate), but the issues above are the ones that ultimately made my decision. Thanks again for all the work that's gone into this browser; I hope this feedback is useful!