When I see people talking about LibreWolf, it’s always loved or hated.

People who hate it complain that it either requires too much configuration to be usable (because of the strict default settings) or that you should just use Mullvad (whether for real reasons or just better marketing about privacy).

People who love it (including me) see it as what Firefox should be: community‑driven and user‑first. However, I believe people using LibreWolf as their main browser (like me) does so only because they’ve tweaked the settings - allowing browsing‑history, password saving, manually adding cookie exceptions for sites they want to stay logged into, etc.

Out of the box, LibreWolf seems to be trying to compete with Mullvad and Tor as a hardcore privacy‑first browser (although letterboxing isn’t default). But can it really do that?
I’m not saying it can’t on a technical level (which I’m in no way qualified to judge), but Mullvad is a huge company and Tor is a very mature project. I’ve read a bunch of guides and watched people talking about privacy browsers, and I never saw anyone recommending LibreWolf over Mullvad or Tor when you want to browse sensitive content or use an online identity you don’t want easily linked to your main one.

Aren’t LibreWolf fans using it as their main daily‑use browser? From what I see (and I don’t know how aligned this is with the project itself or the rest of the user base), LibreWolf is an alternative to Chrome, Firefox, and especially Brave. It’s a truly community‑driven project focused on privacy, prioritizing the user, and not involved in shady business like Brave.

So, when I recommend LibreWolf to people, I suggest it as a substitute for Brave. Out of the box, though, it feels like it’s trying to be an alternative to Mullvad/Tor instead.