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15 Years of Forking

waterfox.com

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Re: 15 Years of Forking

#21

Post by akoboldfrying »

renewiltord wrote: post #14
pedrogpimenta wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do it before they did so?

Looks like I judged them well in not doing so. I would have been such a sucker. After all, donating to corporations is for bootlickers. https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/ So they’re just shilling their own search product on their own browser. No different from Google and Chrome. Except with some corporate bootlicking from running dog lackeys. He literally sold it to an online advertising compa…

I'm impressed by how thoroughly you ignored the question of whether your own inaction was partly responsible for the outcome that occurred later, and which you dislike.

It has persuaded me that your own inaction was totally unrelated to this outcome.

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#23

Post by kajika91 »

I am surprise there is no mention of Librewolf here. The differences of Librewolf and Waterfox is pretty hard to grasp, I am digging a little bit but so far I guess I would say using any of them is still way better than the main alternatives.

Librewolf is, to me, the way better alternative as this is really in the FOSS mindset : a tool for everyone to use and by anyone to contribute. Seeing their plateform alone (Lemmy/Matrix/Codeberg, they also have a reddit community it seems) you can already see this is an other world than Waterwolf's bluesky/reddit/github. To be fair I can understand the SNS part but the github is a big redflag to me.

As usual I can see people that are very probably sincere in their goals not realizing the way they are going will lead to the usual enshitification: company focus, brave dependency, etc.

I note that Waterfox seems to legally originate from UK and it is refreshing to have an ecosystem that is not centralized in 1 country : for the sake of everyone it is better not to rely to much on 1 legislator (see age verification for instance).

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#24

Post by zettabomb »

I remember using Waterfox when it was new. I moved away from it when Firefox started pushing 64 bit builds natively, and I've stuck with it since then. Recently though it does seem as if they might be going down a dark path, so perhaps I'll consider switching again. I remember Waterfox was hard forked after Quantum became a thing, in order to keep support with XPI - is that still the case?

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#26

Post by pedrogpimenta »

renewiltord wrote: post #14
pedrogpimenta wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do it before they did so?

Looks like I judged them well in not doing so. I would have been such a sucker. After all, donating to corporations is for bootlickers. https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/ So they’re just shilling their own search product on their own browser. No different from Google and Chrome. Except with some corporate bootlicking from running dog lackeys. He literally sold it to an online advertising compa…

Right. So you don't ever donate to anything, right? Just in case. The future. You know?

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#27

Post by MrAlex94 »

zettabomb wrote: post #24

I remember using Waterfox when it was new. I moved away from it when Firefox started pushing 64 bit builds natively, and I've stuck with it since then. Recently though it does seem as if they might be going down a dark path, so perhaps I'll consider switching again. I remember Waterfox was hard forked after Quantum became a thing, in order to keep support with XPI - is that still the case?

The hard fork was "Waterfox Classic", which just became unsustainable to maintain.

Rather than support for XPI (which is just the packaging for Firefox webextensions), the current version of Waterfox does still support bootstrapped extensions - in theory anyone can still write one, with access to all the privileged JavaScript APIs typically not accessible to MV2/MV3 webextensions.

It's not widely used though, there are two repos I'm aware of that take advantage of this:

https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...

https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus/

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#28

Post by MrAlex94 »

tommica wrote: post #18

The ads on default search partner is a fine compromise - reality is that projects need money, and if this helps them (and makes it less dependant on donations) then great! As long as the ad blocking happens elsewhere, it is fine. I need to move back to waterfox again...

Yes, enabled everywhere - and it will just be a simple toggle to also enable it on the search partner page, no hoops to jump through.

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#29

Post by MrAlex94 »

BoredPositron wrote: post #22

Sorry, I still can't get over the system1 shit in 2020.

I get the scepticism but IMO the reaction at the time was rough and I partially get why.

System1 is a search syndication company. Their business is contextual ads on search results - no PII, no tracking profiles, no behavioural targeting. It's functionally the same model as DuckDuckGo. If I'd sold to DDG, I don't think anyone would've batted an eyelid.

I get it, the timing (privacy browser sold to company with "ad" in its description) looked terrible in a headline and I take responsibility for not communicating it better at the time, which I feel like wouldn't have led to such a massive furor.

Re: 15 Years of Forking

#30

Post by Vinnl »

tommica wrote: post #18

The ads on default search partner is a fine compromise - reality is that projects need money, and if this helps them (and makes it less dependant on donations) then great! As long as the ad blocking happens elsewhere, it is fine. I need to move back to waterfox again...

Reminds me of Netscape Navigator adding a popup blocker, but also adding the ability to allowlist sites - so that it could have the Netscape website allowlisted by default.
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