On LibreWolf

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been using LibreWolf as my daily driver browser. It’s been about two weeks since then, and I had some thoughts.

I originally tried to compile LibreWolf myself, which is how I found out 16GB of RAM is not enough to compile a web browser. I found this interesting since I was able to compile Floorp🔗 just fine a while back. Have browsers really gotten so complex over the past decade to require that much memory just to compile? Anyway, I just ended up installing the binary from the AUR and got up and running.

One thing I really like is that new tab page is completely blank, except for a search bar. It helps me break the close reddit->new tab->open reddit cycle and generally just reduces distractions. I know this was configurable in Firefox, but having to set it up on every install meant I just stopped caring to do it after a while.

Something I wish was possible is whitelisting certain sites to be able to use WebGL (and other things disabled by default as anti-fingerprinting measures), I can be pretty sure my self-hosted apps aren’t fingerprinting me. I ended up disabling all of these measures because of this.

Finally, I’ve really enjoyed not being logged in to everything all the time. Obviously clearing cookies is configurable on Firefox, but doing it by default is not something I thought I would enjoy. When I want to go waste time on Reddit or YouTube, logging in every time is too much of hassle so I just go back to what I was doing. It’s a nice incentive to browse the smallweb instead!

Overall, it’s been a pretty pleasant experience, and I was surprised that I actually found benefits to LibreWolf over Firefox, I was expecting the two experiences to match pretty closely.