 In my never-ending quest to find the perfect web browser, you guys have suggested that I take a look at a fork of Firefox called LibreWoof. Firefox has always been my web browser of choice for the last couple of decades, but really Mozilla for the last few years, they've been making some pretty poor decisions regarding their web browser and also some of their stances regarding internet privacy and digital rights and things like that. So I was looking to get away from Mozilla the company, but I did like their browser, Firefox. So there are several forks of Firefox out there, things like GNU, Icecat, and Waterfox and Pill Moon, but none of those are great. Many of those don't have the same kind of security updates on a regular basis that mainline Firefox receives. Also, Waterfox is actually owned by a company that's in many ways just as bad or worse than Mozilla. So I was really looking for a community project and LibreWoof really seems like the browser that I want to use because it is really just an exact clone of Firefox. I mean, it's a straight-up fork of Firefox. It resembles Firefox, but I didn't tell you this was the LibreWoof browser. Just looking at it, it looks 100% exactly like Firefox. Now this fork is really focused on privacy, security, and freedom. If you read their homepage here, you see what they've done here is they've stripped out anything that phones home or tries to track you, because by default, Mozilla Firefox does have some stuff like some of the search boxes and things like that do phone home, back to Mozilla. It sends data to either Mozilla or to somebody else, and the great thing about LibreWoof is they have disabled all of that kind of stuff. So there's no telemetry. The searching is private searching. Also the search providers, and so if you decide to add a search box like I did here at the top, your search providers are privacy-conscious search engines like DuckDuckGo or StarkPage or Kwan. I think Medigur is also one of the ones you could add. Serks is also there. You won't find Google or Bing or any of that crap, which is what Firefox pushes on you. The default search engine is Google, if you want to change it. Some of the other ones are just as bad Bing and Yahoo and things like that. You won't find any of that in LibreWoof. We also have UBlock Origin, which is a plugin that blocks ads. That is actually installed and enabled out of the box with LibreWoof. Now it's no big deal in Firefox to install the UBlock Origin plugin and enable it, but it's just nice that they already have that enabled by default, because that does provide some extra level of security, because it blocks a lot of what could be malicious code operating in your browser. Some of the other features they tout are the enhanced security features. We'll talk a little bit about that here in just a minute, fast updates. So LibreWoof tracks very closely to the mainline Firefox code. So when Firefox pushes out security updates, LibreWoof also receives them. So it's not like some of the other forks of Firefox I mentioned, where Firefox is pushing out very serious security updates, but sometimes some of those forks don't really get that stuff, sometimes for months or years afterwards. So I would have a problem running browsers like that. But LibreWoof tracks very closely to the stable version of Firefox. Also LibreWoof is heavily promoting the fact that they are all in on open source. There's mainline Firefox as an open source browser, but LibreWoof is really pushing the fact that, hey, we're all about free software, open source software, and I love that, because Mozilla kind of lost its way, right? Mozilla really doesn't. They don't push open source, you know, like the movement, right? Mozilla these days is very corporate in their speak and just everything about them. We should talk a little bit about how you guys can try out LibreWoof, because being a web browser, hopefully it's in your Linux distributions repositories, those of you running Linux. If it's not, it kind of sucks because you might have to compile it. And compiling a web browser takes forever, it takes hours, right? Anybody that's ever installed a source based distribution, things like Gen2, for example, if you've ever had to compile something like Firefox or Chromium, you know, any web browser brave, you know, it takes forever for those things to compile. But the great thing, those of you that are on Arch, you actually do have a package called LibreWoof-bin, and that's a binary, so it doesn't actually have to compile. There's also a ur package simply called LibreWoof. I think that one actually has to compile. So that's going to be the one that takes forever. What I did is I just installed LibreWoof-bin. Now for those of you that are on distributions that are not Arch-based distributions, the LibreWoof team has packaged LibreWoof as a app image, as a snap pack, and a flat pack. So you have all three of the distro agnostic containerized formats available for you guys. What I would suggest is because the app images are just dead easy to use, grab the LibreWoof app image, and then all you have to do is make that app image executable and then double click on it and boom, you got LibreWoof open on your system. So let me close this tab here, and this is the LibreWoof homepage. Let me open up a new tab. Now a new tab, by default, does nothing here in LibreWoof. So this is a little weird because in Firefox, of course, you have a start page. I still have Firefox installed on my system, so let me show you guys. I have this search bar and this little grid of some of my favorite sites. When I open a new tab, it's the same thing. You don't get that with LibreWoof. I assume because that default kind of home page for Firefox phones home to Mozilla in some way, I know on that page, unless you disable it, it has stories from a pocket and things like that, which most people probably turn off, I turn off that stuff. But some of that stuff is probably tied in to Mozilla in such a way that the LibreWoof team has disabled it so you actually don't get a home page at least out of the box here. So I could go into preferences here and if I go into home here, what I did is I set my home page to just a local file on my system. So if I click the home button, you guys have seen my little custom home page. This is just an HTML file that's hosted locally here on my system. Now the problem with this is while that works for your home page in Firefox and in LibreWoof because it's a fork of Firefox, you actually can't have a new tab open a local file. You can click the home button and have that open a local file, but you can't have the new tab automatically load a local file. So I'm just going to have to deal with having my new tabs be blank for now. There are extensions out there that force the new tab to actually respect your home page, but it still recognizes if your home page is a local file, it won't load that. So I've been looking for a way around that. I think what I'm going to have to do is just dive into the Firefox plug-in website and see what I can find for a new kind of start page plug-in that would allow me just to throw a few bookmarks on the page, just, you know, like my website, my YouTube channel, Patreon, things like that, sites that I go to several times a day. You know, I like having those on a convenient start page. Let me close that tab and that home page. Let's get back into here. Let's talk about some of what is in the preferences because most of this kind of looks like your preferences in Firefox. So let's talk about the things that have changed. Well, the first thing is Firefox home content. So that would be the default Firefox home page, you know, that would have the search box and your grid of bookmarks that you put and then, you know, the pocket stories and all of that. And even though you can check some of this on and off, it actually doesn't load the home page anyway. So I don't know why that's still in the preferences. Maybe it's a bug they're trying to fix. Maybe this home page thing in LibreWolf used to work. Maybe it's just recently that it stopped working. I don't know. But just know that right now none of this is going to work. If you go into the search settings here with the search box, this by default DuckDuckGo is the default search engine. But as I mentioned, there are several privacy-respecting search engines that you can choose. If you don't want to use DuckDuckGo, which, honestly, DuckDuckGo is not my favorite search engine, you know, you also have Circs, StartPage, Jive, Quant, Medigar, NVIDIAs, which is like a YouTube alternative site. And Wikipedia is also here as well. If you wanted to use those under the privacy and security tab, I really haven't played with this stuff. But just know that LibreWolf prides itself on being a hardened version of Firefox. They've taken the trouble to do some extensive modifications to the browser. A lot of the same stuff that you guys would probably do. You'd go in here and take on and off a lot of stuff. They've already anything that should be enabled for privacy and security. They've already got it enabled. Also, those of you that like to play with your user.js, you know, LibreWolf tracks a couple of popular user.js GitLab repositories out there, and they already have all of those settings configured. So if you go to what is it? Is it about colon config? I believe that's it. Yeah. And you click show all. Now, this is typically hidden away from the users. And then, you know, these are the kind of settings that normal users typically would sit. But if you type about colon config in the URL bar, you get a whole bunch of other stuff you could edit. Most users don't need to be playing around in this. And LibreWolf, these guys have actually taken the trouble to go in here and anything that could have been tracking you at all or anything that they consider kind of dangerous. They have already disabled it. You know, they set things like, you know, this browser content blocking reject trackers. They've already set that to false. They've locked it so no one can ever change it. So they've got a lot of stuff already set and locked in such a way that it can never be changed. And I've been playing around with LibreWolf for a couple of days. I actually have not changed anything in the about config. And I don't think I will. I think the chances are they know more about privacy and security settings than me. Now, let's talk about extensions and themes. You block origin was already installed and enabled by default. I installed a couple of other things that I thought would be useful. Things I already had in Firefox. Most of you guys know about HTTPS everywhere. That's something you probably want to install and enable privacy badgers and another good plug in to buddies for YouTube creators. That's because obviously I have a YouTube channel, so I use that. Other than that, I will say searching for add-ons from Mozilla.org. Again, because of blocking, tracking and stuff like that. For some reason, this doesn't work. So if I wanted to search for, I don't know, how about start page? Nothing happens. It opens a new tab, but nothing happens. I think there's just a problem. Anything that involves phoning home to Mozilla in any way, you're just not going to be able to do. But you see it searches add-ons.mozilla.org. Well, just type add-ons.mozilla.org in the URL bar. And you actually go to the add-ons sites. Now, I could search for a start page kind of plug in and I could just pick one. It really doesn't matter. This is just for demonstration purposes. I'll pick speed dial here and it says add to Firefox. I'm going to click on it and it adds it just fine here and LibreWolf hit OK. And there it is. You know, this I guess it's a home page kind of it actually looks pretty good. I may play with that. I don't know. It actually looks a little garish and gaudy, a little more over the top than something I would use. But that's how you handle that. So just know that the search bar here is broken. So you actually do need to just type add-ons.mozilla.org and the URL bar to search for your add-ons. I'm going to go ahead and remove that plug in I installed. Now, for the most part, I found that LibreWolf from just playing with it for a couple of days, it looks and functions just like Firefox. So I haven't done a lot of testing as far as playing media. I do know YouTube works just fine. If I wanted to start one of my YouTube videos and I could play it in 1080, 60. I wanted to make a short video. Looks fine. The video is fine. Audio is fine. Let me try library because I haven't tried library on LibreWolf yet. So let me go to my home page and click on my library page. And let's again, just start a video playing. It may take a second for the video to load in library. Short video, please. Just fine. Now, I haven't tried any kind of DRM restricted content because LibreWolf is so focused on privacy and security. I don't know how things like Netflix or Hulu are going to play in LibreWolf. I would imagine, you know, with Netflix, typically on most browsers in Linux, you're going to have to fight with some silverlight plug-ins and things like that to make Netflix work. I would assume that's going to be the case in LibreWolf as well. Those of you that have been using LibreWolf for a while and are using things like Netflix and Hulu, let us all know in the comments down below that stuff worked for you out of the box. And if it didn't, what you needed to install to get that working for me? I think LibreWolf has everything I needed. It has everything that was in Firefox. The only thing that kind of annoys me is the fact that my new tabs are always a blank page. I've got to find some way to solve that. I just wish I had the default Firefox home page. You know, out of the box, it had the search bar and you had your little bookmarks and a grid, you know, that was kind of a nice feature. I'm sure I could find something like that. By the way, your bookmarks are very easily imported from Firefox over to LibreWolf, so no problem there. You're not going to lose any of your bookmarks moving from Firefox to LibreWolf. So if you guys like a Firefox browser, you know, if you like Firefox, the browser, but not Mozilla, the company, I strongly suggest that you guys take a look at LibreWolf. I think you'll be impressed by this browser. I know in just a couple of days that I've spent with it. I'm very impressed with it. And before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Absi Devon, Fran, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Akami, Arch5530, Chris Chuck, David. The other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Pikm, Scott, Wes, and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the LibreWolf web browser would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.