So I have used firejailed PureBrowser as my default browser since getting my Librem 15 last year. Today, when I updated (sudo apt update/sudo apt full-upgrade/sudo apt autoremove) via the Byzantium repository PureBrowser was removed and Firefox ESR is in its place. Just out of curiosity, why did this happen? Did Purism discontinue support for PureBrowser? Was there some security flaw? Thanks for any information
One thing Iâve done is use a live CD for banking such as the U.S. Air Forces TENS distro. They also used Firefox. Every year or so my bank says my browser is too old a version and thus incompatible with their security. So I download a new TENS distro (which has a newer Firefox) and burn a new live CD.
Iâm tempted to use a PureOS live CD for the same purpose sometime.
So my rhetorical question is, would my bank reject the Ephiphany default browser?
(As being incompatible or ânot on their list of approved browsersâ.)
@mladen
Right decision.
I had to copy the profile from ~/.purism/purebrowser
to ~/.mozilla/firefox
No. (Well no more than there are no doubt unknown security flaws in all of: PureBrowser, Firefox, Epiphany.)
Yes.
As of right now, Firefox ESR is the default browser on PureOS 9 Amber. Epiphany is the default on our development branch, PureOS 10 Byzantium.
Only one way to find out! Try it and see what they say. Some places outright reject browsers based on the User Agent, regardless of whether itâll actually work or not. Their claim is that its easier for them to say âUse Chromeâ than have someone come to them and ask for them to support some random browser like Falkon or Lynx.
Are you planning on ever removing Firefox from the repos? I very much hope not even if you are moving forward with Epiphany. The current situation is, to my mind, the best of both worlds. With the positive direction of travel with Firefox itâs actually a lot more useful to have it, rather than Purebrowser (e.g. no lockout on extensions). And, at the same time, its great to have a commercial company like yours working on improving Gnome Web. Good concept, but It needs it. However, I donât know what having a stock Firefox in your repos does to your FSF certification. Not sure if any FSF-certified OSâs ship with it vs something modified like IceCat.
Canât you change what your UserAgent presents as in most browsers anyway? Just rename it to say youâre using FireFox or something ?
Or am I wildly mistaken here?
Edit: Iâm almost certain Iâve done this before on Firefox with an extension however Iâm not sure about other browsers.
I sure hope not because we literally just added it on Friday
Me neither. Cross that bridge if/when we get there.
Great. Thanks. Just worried that this might be a transition between Purebrowser and only having Gnome Web. Gnome Web needs significant fixing to be useful at all and I cannot imagine it ever getting to where it needs to be to be a fully-functioning desktop browser. The lack of add-ons, in particular support only for Firefoxâs password manager and not things like Bitwarden make it a no-go for me.
I suppose, if FSF donât like stock Firefox you can just put IceCat in and satisfy them, though I must say I preferred Purebrowser to IceCat, and really prefer stock Firefox (especially the most recently version, not the ESR) to both.
There seem to be lots projects out there to âunMozillaâ Firefox (removing things like DRM, telemetry, Pocket integration, etc) but itâs getting harder to do that with every Firefox release. Thatâs what we were up against with PureBrowser and it unfortunately became too daunting of a task (even with tracking ESR like we were). We also wanted to release close to upstream so we had the latest security patches ASAP but again, became unfeasible for our small team.
My personal dream, get everyone in the Linux community together to offer one (ONE!) fork of Firefox, distribute it with flatpak for sandboxing and that it doesnât need to be packaged for every distro. Then we can take some ownership, upstream all the work thatâs put into it, and maybe even get things like hardware video acceleration working. Like I said, a dream
Havenât Firefox effectively done most of that in the latest versions released this year? Feels like you are now just a couple of clicks away to achieve most of that in the version 73 that I have on my laptop now.
this issue stems from the fact that most users who use a browser on GNU/Linux - Debian or PureOS donât know how to tweak the browser settings so there is the issue of fragmentation ⌠so the freedom loving crowd (FSF) say itâs better to offer it without anything that will be non-libre friendly and the other camp would like the option to enable it - OPT IN - but that requires those âfeaturesâ to be present - not removed completely âŚ
the trouble with the OPT IN is that Firefox comes out-of-the-box with OPT-OUT so thatâs where the most arguments against stem from âŚ
There are any number of extensions in Firefox that allow you to alter the UserAgent. However I believe you do need some extension i.e. not standard functionality.
However if you have the resistFingerprinting option enabled in Firefox then Firefox automatically falsifies the UserAgent in an appropriate way, and hence it is probably better not to use one of the above extensions when using that option. (I wouldnât even be able to say which one predominates if you choose to have both.)
Thanks. . . . . . . . . .
I copied over my profile from ~/.purism/purebrowser to ~/.mozilla/firefox, and renamed it from default to default-pb so I could tell which one it was. When I look at about:profiles, it is not in the list so I cannot tell Firefox to start using it. Suggestions on how to get my bookmarks back please?
We made a step by step guide and you have the option to use command line or GUI to facilitate the change.
In your case @Amarula, since youâve already moved the profile over, start with step 5 in the command line method.
Perfect, thank you. I am going to suggest to Firefox that they add this to their help as well.
They actually have all this info in their Knowledgebase already: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data
Itâs what I used to help write might part the wiki entry I linked to above.