Weblibre: the Privacy-Focused Browser
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The debate surrounding WebLibre, a privacy-focused browser built using Gecko and Mozilla Android Components, has sparked a lively discussion about its legitimacy and the implications of its anonymous maintainers. While some commenters, like elashri, point out that it's essentially an Android Firefox fork, others, like Semaphor, argue that it's not a direct fork due to its use of Mozilla Android Components. The conversation takes a deeper dive into the importance of knowing a developer's identity, with some, like yupyupyups, expressing concerns about the anonymous maintainers, while others, like c0wb0yc0d3r, argue that open-source licenses already limit liability, making identity less relevant. The discussion reveals a consensus that anonymity can be both a protective shield and a hindrance to accountability, with some, like zeta0134, suggesting that social accountability can be a powerful motivator.
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It is added to the growing list of Firefox forks on Android
- Iceraven
- Fennec
- Waterfox
- Tor
- IronFox
- Firefox Focus (By Mozilla itself)
Any others?
Judging by the commit logs, the main two maintainers are one anonymous guy (nothing linking his profile to a real person) and some Chinese guy (is he a Chinese national or not?)
Although these may be perfectly well-meaning people, we can't just trust them to maintain something so critical as a web browser.
I fully respect peoples' right to anonymity, but such projects need at least one core maintainer to be an identifiable person, imo. Just to establish trust and accountability in case anything does happen.
I hope this is not taken the wrong way and that you understand what I'm getting at here.
Yes it's not a name and face, but I can understand wanting to maintain separation between government identity and online identity
Here's another Ironfox dev: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsaky/
I didn't see any others. I'm not quite clear where you're getting this idea that either of these people are PRC nationals either, or why that would really matter. The PRC is huge in the FOSS space, and it's not like I'm a huge fan of the country (I live in Taiwan) but credit where it's due.
When it comes to Chinese nationals, you can't expect them to be held accountable if they were to do something malicious. China hosts a lot of cyber crimimals who have had free reign for some 2 decades to target people online. Also, we don't even know who this guy really is, let alone his nationality, was Jia Tan a real name? Who knows.
They also lobby politicians to betray their own nations in favour of US (corporate) interests.
Not to blame the victim here, but many times it's other countries fault for allowing themselves to be put in this predicament.
When it comes to China or Russia, those have already strained relationships with the US and the rest of the Western world and do not mind dirty tactics. There is nothing really holding them back from engaging in covert cyber warfare.
It's different types of threats that need to be dealt with differently.
Like many countries in the world like US, EU states etc.
What sort of accountability can be gained by knowing someone’s identity in a case like that?
Web browsers are also a rare class of software with high complexity and also high privilege (considering the data that typically passes through them), so perhaps higher scrutiny of this class of software is warranted.
Which one do you choose?
And if both do that, have same features, work the same, etc., no other difference, then I'll take the smaller one - because the larger one most probably includes something I don't want, even if it's just bloat or inefficient code.
For me, he lost his credibility, when, with childish "historical" arguments, he choose to ban russian developers from the linux kernel. Can we still trust him to not insert a backdoor in the kernel, "to fight the russians" ?
An anonymous individual might also have multiple anonymous accounts, for example. Without that anonymity, other projects might ban their contributions, and users might not use their software.
But you can trust any random guy to maintain Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge. /s
You’ve been heard, and accordingly Google will now demand ID or boot them out of the Play Store!
Kidding, not until next year :)
I downloaded WebLibre out of curiosity and can say it's different from those other browsers. I've never seen a mobile browser that lets you run Tor-enabled private tabs, or mobile-friendly multi-account containers. The UI also bears nearly no semblance to Firefox (besides the rendering engine, only the extension management area reminds me of it).
I was recommending Firefox to my friend to avoid a weather app's ads. Turns out he got ads on Firefox too. Removing them is easy in the settings but not for the general public.
The question though is : where will the funds of WebLibre come ? Implementing a browser is hard. If Firefox continues to drift, who will pay for the development of the engine ?
The .eu in the domain lets me think this is a european project, but I wasn't able to find a "about us" page.
Who pays for it? Many are FOSS projects, specially where privacy is concerned. Plain old FireFox still tracks telemetry, which is more than some people like. People hate being tracked and having their every thought examined for its advertising potential to the point that people build privacy-focused browsers for free as a public good.
Sometimes donations work as well, like how the Tor project works. But Tor is running servers, so their financial needs are much heavier.
For instance, the two mentioned Linux sandbox escapes [1] involve two things that have disappeared in many setups: X11 and pulseaudio. We now have Wayland and pipewire, which should both be better in this aspect IIUC. The mentioned bug related to X11 was also closed 3 years ago.
[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492
Sure this particular bug has been fixed but Firefox Security is nothing compared to the Millions Google is paying to ensure security. Just the amount of paid, full time eyeballs on chromium security alone makes a huge difference.
Runs a local AI model for suggesting tab and container names. It supports tab containers.
Suggests you to install ublock origin on first step itself.
There's tor, tree view tabs and duck duck go styled bangs synced from a number of repos.
I would like to keep my data from bad actors with illegal ops or malware, but willing to sacrifice some to a legitimate corporation with data protection rules set up for a better personalized experience. I guess chrome with ublock origin lite is all I need.
Is this browser exclusively for the .1% that will not even load a google web page?
It's we the people who took a private company's product as public infrastructure, integrated into our lives, replaced any processes we can with a Google one. Entire economies, businesses, governments depend on gmail and google sheets.
Naming things matters and if FireFox had been called WebLibre or LibreBrowser it would have been far less appealing.
There’s just something lame about it and it’s too many syllables, same deal with XLibre.
It's even more lame when you're French.
Joke aside, I agree with you, the "libre" suffix/prefix carries some undertones of "it's going to be old and ugly but open source".
Really, office suites are kind of a late-90’s concept anyway, so having UI that looks weird by modern standards is appropriate probably.
is this opinion based on recent experiences of the libreoffice suite?
We may agree with RMS that we should be free to own our computers and run whatever we want on them. But he says that commercial software should not exist. That's clearly insane, which makes it easy to dismiss everything he says as insane, even if a lot of it isn't.
Similarly, the man himself is extremely weird and creepy. It's easy to dismiss him on those grounds too even if they don't directly relate to tech things.
What we definitely need is more normal people with normal view that support normal software freedoms without going to crazy extremes.
For example, I have no problem pronouncing "ender" because it has no elements that have unambiguous pronunciation. I also have no problem pronouncing "centre", because it's a well known word with well known pronunciation. But libre is not an existing English word, and "-bre" does not have an unambiguous pronunciation heuristics, so it's unclear how it is intended to be pronounced.
Not an issue in Spanish because it is (apparently) a word in Spanish.
Another example of a bad naming is Forgejo. Terrible. I'm sure it has very clear pronunciation if you speak Esperanto.
I've given up on it, and just use a list of turns and distances, because that way I miss the turns far less often.
Obviously designers can destroy products too, but we got much bigger problems than that in 2025. Most of the garbage today come from business decisions and technical fads.
If all that changed was that everything ran slower and took more battery power and increased the liklihood of closing when backgrounded, that's all I would be complaining about, but what I'm conplaining about here is that updates lead to reduced feature sets, buttons and links that are impossible to differentiate from inactive elements, and icons that vaguely hint at a skuemorphic past, but look more like hamburgers, kebabs, and petifores than what they're actually supposed to respresent.
What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words?
Wait, I take that back, please don't make menus that consist entirely of abstract shapes and squiggles. (https://f-droid.org/repo/org.woheller69.browser/en-US/phoneS...)
> What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words?
The truth is that real estate became incredibly constrained with mobile, and hover also disappeared. Imo the hamburgers and triple dots are close to how good you can get on mobile. There's little point in adding the word "menu" or "options". Basically any text you add on mobile would take full screen width to be safe in all languages. And thats pretty much what open menus look like - they take over the whole screen.
Due to mobile being the primary target, a lot of devs reuse those GUIs for much bigger screens, which is unfortunate.
anyway, to enjoy lucha libre you have to accept it's like going to the circus (and drunk).
don't expect it to be a fight. which is the one i don't get instead. you have to be really deranged to enjoy box or mma
I still wonder what would have happened if they instead settled to keep the acronym in return for giving massive PR to the World Wildlife folks. As in like, having positive pro-ecological messages and characters in perpetuity. We could all be watching the World Wrestling Foundation to see the title match between (insert name of actual wrestler here) and a wrestler named The Tree Sloth or something...
I don't go out of my way to watch them, but if a friend wants to invite me over to watch a match, I wont be as bored as if it was sportball.
Don't mind the "Libre" too much tbh, because I use some quality products that use it ... but yes, it's only a matter of time before marketing nerds ruin an already unappealing term
Why stop here ? Microsoft, Meta and Apple products are also "public utility and national security critical". /s
If yes, I'll try it out.
I primarily use Pale Moon, and CloudFlare blocks me from a bunch of websites, because I don't provide enough tracking data to convince them I'm not a bot.
Some settings are not self-explaining, for example "improve built-in query stripping".
I suppose that's to be expected for an alpha.
Not being able to add a custom search engine URL (at least as far as I can tell) is unfortunately what will make me not use this browser.
https://docs.weblibre.eu/Personal-Local-Search-Engine
well, I didn't see that combination of words coming
Anyway, I wish the headline had specified "... for Android"