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Enabling videoconference in Librewolf

2021-06-15

Enabling videoconference in Librewolf

Introduction

This might be the shortest post I will ever write, but I found interesting share with you. Despite this might be a stupidity I would say it is not so easy to find this around the web. As I mentioned in the past I am a Artixlinux user. In this new Artixlinux announced they made Archlinux repositories optional.

In my case I got a new laptop from the company to work, so I decided to install Artixlinux, I personally enabled Archlinux repositories because I know I would need them for sure, especially for work but I always do my best to not install anything from those repositories. In the case of Firefox, which are in the “community” repositories from Archlinux, the main alternative in Artix is Librewolf.

As many of you probably know, Librewolf is a fork of Firefox which aims to be much more suitable for privacy. It removes things like telemetry, pocket and so on.

I like this browser but until qutebrowser, which is on Archlinux repositories too, does not solve the problems with webrtc, I will have to trust Librewolf and Ungoogled-chromium as alternatives to work.

Process

Now I will stop talking rubbish and I will show you the steps I followed to have videoconference enabled in librewolf. Mostly of that information I found in librewolf FAQ.

Create the file “librewolf.overrides.cfg”. In the link I showed you before, depending on the installation and operative system it can be found in one path or other. In Artixlinux you can create it in ~/.librewolf/librewolf.overrides.cfg
```
 touch /.librewolf/librewolf.overrides.cfg
```

With your favourite edit just add the following:

 defaultPref("media.peerconnection.enabled", true);
 defaultPref("media.peerconnection.ice.no\_host", false);
 defaultPref("dom.webaudio.enabled", true);
 defaultPref("media.getusermedia.screensharing.enabled", true);

 defaultPref("media.autoplay.blocking\_policy", 0);
 defaultPref("media.autoplay.default", 1);

Save the file, restart the browser and you should have the configurations enabled.
In the browser, you can check the “about:config” to see all the parameters are configured properly.

Difference between this how to and librewolf FAQ

The configurations media.autoplay.blocking_policy and media.autoplay.default which I copied from a Firefox installation, I did that because the webcam freeze and when someone shared the screen, it was freeze too and in my case I need those features to work.

Conclusions

These kind of changes enable more features to the browser in exchange of less privacy, but for work environments librewolf can be a good alternative to evaluate. What I find sad it’s like this is something such a"cat and mouse" game when I have to do complicated stuffs to protect my privacy, especially when it suppose to be a right.

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