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Easily transition to from firefox to librewolf with just one command

In light of the recent statement published by Mozilla's new CEO, many people are deciding to switch off of Firefox to another browser, myself included.

Unfortunately, in today's browser landscape all of the alternatives are using chrome or firefox under the hood. These browsers still offer different things in terms of user experience and privacy, but those who are switching off of Firefox are likely doing so because of Mozilla themselves and probably care a bit more about digital hygiene than your average person.

Why librewolf? Why not another firefox fork, chrome, brave, or misc?

The browser you choose it up to you to decide. LibreWolf is one of the best hardened browsers out there, but in order to achieve this they delete the cookies of every website you visit by default, meaning that you will have to re-log into every website you use unless you whitelist them. You do this by clicking on the small lock icon and toggle in the search bar. This is for websites that you are okay with knowing who you are and that you probably already use an account with. For the websites you go to that aren't whitelisted, you'll have to re-log each visit if you have an account.

If privacy isn't your main concern, you may want to check out other web browsers with better user experience or features like Chrome, Brave or Vivaldi. There's actually many, many web browsers out there. Now may also be a good time to research others as well.

At the same time, ad-blocking isn't as nice on chrome based browsers and Google doesn't seem to be changing their stance on that anytime soon. This is the reason why I'm sticking to a Firefox fork along with the fact that its a browser I can copy all of my history and login data to.

Other than that I'm only currently trying LibreWolf right now and do not vouch for them entirely. You might not like the maintainers, or the fact that only a few people are maintaining it, and that is another valid reason to use a different web browser too.

In a perfect world, we would probably have something like a well maintained, purely open sourced option to chrome and firefox, using their own engine. Projects like Ladybird are trying to push in this direction and have been making some really good progress, I would check them out.

Copy your data

Ok this is really simple.

Firefox (and by consequence librewolf) have this really cool feature called profiles. They're basically isolated instances of the browser with their own bookmark/history/cookie data. You can use them to seperate the stuff you use for personal browsing and for work. They are saved in their own folders, and you can copy over their contents directly. However, you can't just move over the entire folders since you will also lose a lot of librewolf's patches. So instead, we need to copy over what we value most.

Here I assume you are using a unix-like operating system with a terminal, but the same stuff goes for windows or anything else (you're literally just copying these files over):

First make a new librewolf profile to bring all of your data to. You can do this in the the profiles menu, which you can open by running librewolf -P (and firefox -P)

You can see which profile you're using in these browsers by visiting about:support. Here you can locate the exact profile directories.

Then type:

$ cd .mozilla/firefox/<old profile> && cp places.sqlite places.sqlite-wal cookies.sqlite logins.db ~/.librewolf/<new profile>

Some notes:

Ending notes

I hope this article makes it easier for someone to transition off of firefox onto another web browser. If you have any thoughts or think that something should be changed in this article, send an email to h1divpointer ( at ) pm.me.