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.
Social accountability, for one. Never underestimate shame as a motivating factor for humans. I'm generally in favor of protecting anonymity, so I'm not fully in agreement that this should be a hard requirement for a software project, but I can at least see the appeal of the idea.
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.
Imagine that you have a choice between two pieces of software. The developer of one of those pieces of software is Linus Torvalds. The developer of the other piece of software is Mikhail Vasiliev.
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.
If "being a Chinese national" is an argument for "not trustworthy", I'm sorry but "being an American national" also becomes an argument for "not trustworthy". By about 400% more (and I'm being nice).
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.
I've been to Celenity's homepage and he seems like a privacy-conscious guy, and that's more than fine. From a user's perspective, the dilemma remains though.
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.
Many of the browsers you mentioned above are basically Firefox reskins with better settings out of the box.
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).
Is it? They say it’s using Gecko + Mozilla Android Components. Which would probably make it similar to FF in many ways, but not a fork. I didn’t look further into it though (as I want FF, especially Mozilla sync)
Interesting. Just one hour ago, I was removing the Amazon & co links that Firefox imposes to users on the home page.
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.
Note that UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is a mandatorily for-profit type of company. It is required to retain one quarter of earnings until it reaches 25000€ - the minimum capitalization for a GmbH - and then it may apply to convert to a GmbH.
There's maybe a couple dozen forks of FireFox or other Chromium-based browsers out there. Probably more, but certainly enough that this headline made me give a slight eyeroll, thinking "another one, huh? OK, so what's actually different here?"
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.
My first association with -libre in product names is LibreOffice. And that has managed to look old and ugly for as long as I can remember, with little to no improvement
It was ugly when it was called StarOffice, and also ugly when it was called OpenOffice. So calling it LibreOffice should have been obvious from the start!
You are conflating design with bloat. It's not the designers fault that click tracker SDKs and 15 microservices with eventual consistency is running in the background. They didn't make the mobile app 300MB.
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.
I agree that applications, especially ones using web interfaces, gain significant bloat with each iteration, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I'm complaining about.
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?
Blender is testament against that and the only free software that has made huge inroads into creative work and it only happened after serious UI/UX work
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
I agree. It's lame, difficult to pronounce, and clearly identifies the project as something that only RMS-level uber-nerds would care about. Terrible name.
Definitely not. RMS-level uber-nerds are easy to dismiss because they have genuinely crazy views, and also because they tend to be super weird people.
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.
Well, it is difficult to pronounce if you don't speak spanish, portuguese, italian, and probably others. For me, as native Spanish speaker is super easy to say.
The difficulty is that it doesn't follow unambiguous English pronunciation heuristics.
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.
Is there any effective way to signal to the users who care that your product is committed to Free/Libre Open source principles without also making it sound lame?
I tried to watch WWF in Puerto Rico the 90s but just didn't understand why all my friends liked it. I still don't. I did play the games back then though, those were more fun than watching the show. I never even bothered with Lucha Libre tbh.
It only changed in the mid to late nineties because they lost a lawsuit to the panda.
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...
That's funny I actually prefer boxing and MMA because there's a lot more at stake than most other sports. I respect that they have to train to be as optimal as possible to do those sports where you risk much more.
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.
I can't set Google as my auto complete provider. It's not on the list.
I was able to set Google as default search engine but had to go to a separate blank search page and type it out.
It would've been nice if Google was in the main list.
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 admit that was definitely tongue in cheek.
But brave is on the front page. Maybe they're better.
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?
I doubt even 0.1% manage to avoid loading a google page or script while browsing the web, but there is a lot of momentum behind the (apparently herculean) effort to reduce the presence of google in one's life to the greatest practical degree.
Future generations will look us in disbelief. Google made incredibly good products, search, gmail, maps, youtube, a mobile os platform. I won't fault them one bit.
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.
To the contrary, the better a browser is at avoiding tracking, the more likely you are to be banned from the get go.
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.
How current is this still? Asking as a complete noob. I don't expect Firefox's architecture to have changed much, but it's been 3 years, so it could have improved a lot since this was written, and there are things I know about that are outdated in this document.
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.
Firefox Development is essentially dead. Mozilla fucked us over collectively.
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.
Maybe all of this is true, but it's a different threat model than I'm concerned with. I'm not that worried about malware exploits, I'm far more worried about software behaving "correctly" in a user-hostile manner.
What we really need is to declare Chrome public utility and national security critical. Then have a steering committee and open transparent development that benefits users first. This goes in hand with Chrome being taken away from Google, as have been recently announced.
Not really sure what the point of this is. As others have said, there is already an abundance of privacy focused Firefox forks on Android. I think Ladybird is where the future of user respecting web browsing is at.
I think this should be specified that it is only "Android" Firefox fork.
It is added to the growing list of Firefox forks on Android
- Iceraven
- Fennec
- Waterfox
- Tor
- IronFox
- Firefox Focus (By Mozilla itself)
Any others?
>IronFox
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.
>such projects need at least one core maintainer to be an identifiable person
You’ve been heard, and accordingly Google will now demand ID or boot them out of the Play Store!
Kidding, not until next year :)
Every open source license I’ve seen clearly states that the licensed material comes without warranty and limits liability.
What sort of accountability can be gained by knowing someone’s identity in a case like that?
Social accountability, for one. Never underestimate shame as a motivating factor for humans. I'm generally in favor of protecting anonymity, so I'm not fully in agreement that this should be a hard requirement for a software project, but I can at least see the appeal of the idea.
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.
Don't forget the shockingly high number of folks with a distorted sense of shame.
Imagine that you have a choice between two pieces of software. The developer of one of those pieces of software is Linus Torvalds. The developer of the other piece of software is Mikhail Vasiliev.
Which one do you choose?
The license will not protect the developer from law if they added a malicious backdoor.
Reputation harm.
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.
If "being a Chinese national" is an argument for "not trustworthy", I'm sorry but "being an American national" also becomes an argument for "not trustworthy". By about 400% more (and I'm being nice).
It depends. Trust and security are not universal, they do and always have depended on your own security posture, priorities, and needs.
I'd say this is an issue anytime accountability cannot be expected.
I don't necessarily disagree but I was quite easily able to find more information about one of the devs: https://celenity.dev/about/
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.
I've been to Celenity's homepage and he seems like a privacy-conscious guy, and that's more than fine. From a user's perspective, the dilemma remains though.
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.
Many of the browsers you mentioned above are basically Firefox reskins with better settings out of the box.
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).
Is it? They say it’s using Gecko + Mozilla Android Components. Which would probably make it similar to FF in many ways, but not a fork. I didn’t look further into it though (as I want FF, especially Mozilla sync)
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Interesting. Just one hour ago, I was removing the Amazon & co links that Firefox imposes to users on the home page.
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.
It’s a German company behind it, probably a one man show: https://docs.weblibre.eu/Legal/Imprint
Note that UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is a mandatorily for-profit type of company. It is required to retain one quarter of earnings until it reaches 25000€ - the minimum capitalization for a GmbH - and then it may apply to convert to a GmbH.
There's maybe a couple dozen forks of FireFox or other Chromium-based browsers out there. Probably more, but certainly enough that this headline made me give a slight eyeroll, thinking "another one, huh? OK, so what's actually different here?"
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.
Can’t help feeling the “-Libre” “Libre-“ branding on projects is cursed.
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.
> There’s just something lame about it
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".
it's going to be old and ugly for now
My first association with -libre in product names is LibreOffice. And that has managed to look old and ugly for as long as I can remember, with little to no improvement
LibreOffice did have some nice improvements over OpenOffice.
Really, office suites are kind of a late-90’s concept anyway, so having UI that looks weird by modern standards is appropriate probably.
It was ugly when it was called StarOffice, and also ugly when it was called OpenOffice. So calling it LibreOffice should have been obvious from the start!
Someday it will be newly improved and uglier
Fun fact: libre is an ancient Latin term for "any UX or design concerns will be ignored".
In Spanish it just means "free" but like the GNU catchphrase, it doesn't mean free beer, its associated more so with the word liberty.
In that case, sign me up. It's one of those fields where the more work that goes into it, the worse it gets.
You are conflating design with bloat. It's not the designers fault that click tracker SDKs and 15 microservices with eventual consistency is running in the background. They didn't make the mobile app 300MB.
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.
I agree that applications, especially ones using web interfaces, gain significant bloat with each iteration, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I'm complaining about.
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...)
Blender is testament against that and the only free software that has made huge inroads into creative work and it only happened after serious UI/UX work
All of computation is evidence against this. Are you getting raw gps coordinates for directions in your car?
I feel the same with products that end in "Pro".
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
Pro can work well in distinguishing a paid product from it's free counterpart but Grocery List Maker Pro gets a bit silly.
I agree. It's lame, difficult to pronounce, and clearly identifies the project as something that only RMS-level uber-nerds would care about. Terrible name.
Given the current situation on Android, we definitely need more RMS-level uber-nerds!
Definitely not. RMS-level uber-nerds are easy to dismiss because they have genuinely crazy views, and also because they tend to be super weird people.
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.
Well, maybe not entirely rms-level.
Well, it is difficult to pronounce if you don't speak spanish, portuguese, italian, and probably others. For me, as native Spanish speaker is super easy to say.
The difficulty is that it doesn't follow unambiguous English pronunciation heuristics.
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.
Is there any effective way to signal to the users who care that your product is committed to Free/Libre Open source principles without also making it sound lame?
I always think of Lucha libre which I always thought of as tacky and silly.
I tried to watch WWF in Puerto Rico the 90s but just didn't understand why all my friends liked it. I still don't. I did play the games back then though, those were more fun than watching the show. I never even bothered with Lucha Libre tbh.
i think you mean WWE... or were there pandas?
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
It only changed in the mid to late nineties because they lost a lawsuit to the panda.
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...
That's funny I actually prefer boxing and MMA because there's a lot more at stake than most other sports. I respect that they have to train to be as optimal as possible to do those sports where you risk much more.
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.
If you go back far enough, WWE was called WWF. Certainly true in it's initial heyday of Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant.
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https://github.com/FaFre/WebLibre/tree/v0.9.21/packages/flut...
well, I didn't see that combination of words coming
Anyway, I wish the headline had specified "... for Android"
I can't set Google as my auto complete provider. It's not on the list. I was able to set Google as default search engine but had to go to a separate blank search page and type it out. It would've been nice if Google was in the main list.
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.
https://searchengine.party/ might save you some time in the future
You may be missing the point of this browser.
I admit that was definitely tongue in cheek. But brave is on the front page. Maybe they're better.
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?
I doubt even 0.1% manage to avoid loading a google page or script while browsing the web, but there is a lot of momentum behind the (apparently herculean) effort to reduce the presence of google in one's life to the greatest practical degree.
Future generations will look us in disbelief. Google made incredibly good products, search, gmail, maps, youtube, a mobile os platform. I won't fault them one bit.
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.
Please note that their GitHub releases are not libre and contain proprietary Google Play Services libraries.
The personal local search engine concept is interesting. I wish this was packaged as a browser plugin for the wider browser ecosystem.
https://docs.weblibre.eu/Personal-Local-Search-Engine
So ... this makes how many "privacy focused" web browsers out there now???
Yeah that was my first thought as well - what browser doesn’t bill itself as protecting your privacy these days?
What's the key difference between weblibre and Tor, Bromite, Cromite or Vanadium? Why should anyone use it?
There is a setting for Google Safe Browsing, but you can't turn it off. Tapping the toggle does nothing.
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.
Would this browser prevent Reddit from banning me each time I create a new account even with different devices?
If yes, I'll try it out.
To the contrary, the better a browser is at avoiding tracking, the more likely you are to be banned from the get go.
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.
Interesting
I'm gonna leave this here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
How current is this still? Asking as a complete noob. I don't expect Firefox's architecture to have changed much, but it's been 3 years, so it could have improved a lot since this was written, and there are things I know about that are outdated in this document.
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
Firefox Development is essentially dead. Mozilla fucked us over collectively.
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.
Also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Exactly what I was thinking: a modern privacy first proposal may be better suited with starting from chromium, even if it hurts feelings
The Tor Browser still being based on Firefox makes me feel a lot better about it.
Even if it's not on topic, that post is quite interesting.
Maybe all of this is true, but it's a different threat model than I'm concerned with. I'm not that worried about malware exploits, I'm far more worried about software behaving "correctly" in a user-hostile manner.
So is trying to compete with Brave browser?
What we really need is to declare Chrome public utility and national security critical. Then have a steering committee and open transparent development that benefits users first. This goes in hand with Chrome being taken away from Google, as have been recently announced.
Yes, because that's what adding government influence does--benefit users lol
Not really sure what the point of this is. As others have said, there is already an abundance of privacy focused Firefox forks on Android. I think Ladybird is where the future of user respecting web browsing is at.
I'm curious what kind of reasoning with coming up with such a project, when there are already so many alternatives
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