- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
I would like to invite all of you Linux users to check out the latest release of Konform Browser.
Konform Browser is a free/libre and open-source (FLOSS) fork of Firefox with the primary goals of security, privacy, and user freedom. Hoping to be an example of how these three goals don’t have to be at odds but support each other and work in harmony. Would love to hear your feedback on if it’s in the right direction and what can be improved.
Been posting on and off the lemmies about the project during 2026 and previously on this community. Below are major highlights since 140.8.0-103 update from two weeks back:
- Bundling and enforcing use of bundled fonts. Konform Browser now carries the same font-loading patches and bundled fonts as Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser. While this does increase download- and installation sizes, it has two clear benefits: - Significantly improved resistance against font fingerprinting used by tracking scripts. Konform Browser should now be more robust against this attack by having shared global font fingerprint. - All languages and scripts should render as expected regardless of what fonts you have installed on system.
- Also bundled is now Multi-Account Containers Lite addon. It’s a debloated1 fork of Firefox Multi-Account Containers so you can utilize Container Tabs and set per-container proxies without installing addon for it.
- While “AI chatbot” feature was already disabled and hidden by default, it was previously still possible to trigger activation of proprietary networked centralized cloudbots by setting pref
browser.ml.chat.enabled=true. These have now been fully removed and replaced by a single provider utilizing locally running llamafile instance. - Ported a bunch of security fixes and improvement on fingerprinting protection from FF Rapid Release and Tor Browser which didn’t make it into upstream FF ESR.
For details and references see linked release notes. For even more details I hope the commit log is digestible.
Packages available for most Linux distributions.
Konform Browser is also on Mastodon where followers make me happy: https://techhub.social/@konform
1: Similarly as rest of Konform Browser: Removal and disabling of telemetry, analytics, ads, touting, nags (“call-to-actions”), and integrations with centralized proprietary service (Mozilla VPN in this case).
Update: Latest release now has updated preferences pane. Took the opportunity to include some other small changes in that area from the backlog while at it. Improved thanks to your feedback ^^
Sweet <3 Thank you for taking care of it. Looks good now.
May I ask, does Cloudflare verification work on your side, is it issue specific to my setup? Couldn’t read it between the lines of your replies so far ;-) I mean absolutely any website that implements this check. Not specifically one that I mentioned, it were pure example. I haven’t yet met one that succeeds. Other few [pure examples] that fail: xAI account login page (though this one requires some account email to be inserted first to Cloudflare widget to appear), Phoronix forums (link to discussion at any of it’s news articles pages).
And just letting you know one more time I enjoy Konform very much. It impresses me how easily it can be adapted to any use case by simply choosing different option at first start and adjusting extentions. And on top of it, browsing feels very fast (maybe my Librewolf instance just grown fat on user data, I don’t know).
I have some thoughts that are not neccesary specific to Konform by but perhaps generally to Firefox. It’s just an ideas of something that could (or [more probably] could not) be potentially improved, nothing more. You can ignore it alltogether!
Is there a good reason behind not remembering browser window state (windowed/maximized) between sessions while resist fingerprinting and letterboxing are both enabled? Only thing that comes to mind is that if user wrongly resizes the window with dimensions not compatible with any of letterbox resolutions. For example, two of my use cases. 1) LAN-only instance with letterboxing disabled, browser window maximized automatically at start using Openbox window rule. 2) Network instance, heavily sandboxed with Firejail + Xephyr, with correctly calculated Xephyr window dimensions so that exact letterbox resolution fits ideally together with other browser UI elements; still have to use the same Openbox rule in this case since browser does not start maximized automatically (and whenever it’s not the resolution is not right).
And considering pre-activation of system-wide installed extentions listed within /usr/lib/konform/distribution/policies.json file. I like the idea - updating uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes, etc. via Arch repos. But e.g. for LAN-only instance it makes little sense to import uBlock Origin. Since I sandbox everything, I work this around by simply blacklisting /usr/lib/firefox/browser/extensions folder for this particular instance. Works good. But maybe there’s some more elegant way to do this, something like specifying flags on command line and/or reading such file per-user somewhere from ${HOME}/.config? I suspect my ideas are hilariously wrong since I know nothing about it; that’s expected.
As I said, both things are not an issues for me and already resolved on my side. Just wondering if there could be easier solutions for someone else who probably doesn’t sandbox or doesn’t wish to mess with window manager rules.