That’s only works so long as Firefox stays alive and in development.

LibreWolf relies on Firefox being funded, if Firefox dies then LibreWolf also dies. Tens of millions of dollars go into engineering salaries to keep Firefox up-to-date on web standards, features, and performance. LibreWolf benefits from this.

First, mostly as if in Firefox. Go open Netflix, just for the laugh of it.

Second, a fork that depends on Mozilla’s power to develop the upstream is not really in the clear. From a licensing perspective, sure. But let’s assume the worst (because it’s 2025 after all). Firefox is no longer open source. Sure, we can fork from where they left. But building, maintaining, and evolving a browser engine (and the browser itself) requires substantial work. Which means, developers/maintainers, and money. And staying on a “bare” browser might not be viable as long as standards keeps evolving and 95% of people will not care about that stuff.

All that to say, a fork is an option for now. A more tangible solution for the future is needed. A new “Mozilla” without the $millions CEO and structure, Mozilla splitting Firefox into a clean base and a commercial product, something else. But not a fork that just follow Firefox source.

I found it ironically frustrating that converting from Firefox to LibreWolf is harder than from literally any other browser, because there’s no import mechanism.

It wouldn’t be that hard to make a standalone tool to import bookmarks, passwords, and config settings, and would make LibreWolf a seamless transition for Firefox users. Instead, it’s a frustrating process in re-creating years of tweaks.