Ben Weinstein-Raun

ben@superstimul.us

Hello! I'm Ben. I like to make stuff and not go extinct. I'm the admin of the superstimul.us Friendica instance.

Network Posts

Berkeley, California, USA

https://benwr.net

Ben Weinstein-Raun

1 week ago •

Ben Weinstein-Raun
1 week ago •

Around the beginning of my vacation I put some effort points into picking the "right" web browser for me as of mid-2025.

Desiderata:

Open-source
Non-kneecapped uBlock Origin
Cross-device sync
not on some weird slippery slope of trying to get monetized (though it's okay if it's downstream of a browser that is on that slope)

I had been using Brave for a few months since Chrome stopped supporting Manifest v2, but eventually Chromium is going to deprecate Manifest v2 as well, so Brave's days are numbered.

Conclusion:

For desktop, LibreWolf: reasonably well-resourced Firefox rebrand without the monetization junk. To install it you have to tell macOS that it's okay that it hasn't been notarized by apple, e.g. using brew install --no-sandbox. There are some very annoying default settings that you'll want to change (e.g. I'd recommend turning off the stuff aimed at avoiding fingerprinting, which makes Google Maps buggy and prevents you from uploading images on many sites) but after I did that everything wor

like this

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Daniel Filan

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 1 week ago •

One weird thing about Fennec is that somehow I can't zoom into pictures on Twitter.

Ben Weinstein-Raun doesn't like this.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Ben Weinstein-Raun

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 5 days ago •

Update: There are several minor-ish annoyances with LibreWolf:

(as with probably most non-big-boy browsers, I think), it doesn't seem to support Widevine, which means you can't use some streaming services, and others don't support HD video.
Google Maps zooming, which is normally smooth in most browsers, is jerky and a little annoying in LibreWolf
Some other webapps use maps libraries that also don't seem to work well (e.g. I can't see the DoorDash delivery map)
You can't easily add Google as a search engine; it seems to have a special case where it will refuse to add a custom search engine named "Google"; you have to call it something else (!). This seems like a very weird / user-hostile choice, but you can still add the search engine as long as you call it something else (e.g. "G" or "Google Search")

I'm going to keep using it, because I find these issues less annoying than upstream Firefox.

⇧