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Waterfox Browser

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Re: Waterfox Browser

#41

Post by lelandfe »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #31

I use Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, along five other browsers, on a 2008 iMac. Waterfox is stable and workable for me. I use Vimium-FF for keyboard things. My use case: I only visit a few sites, including this one, and rarely click the article links here. I really like it, it is like a Firefox which has been through obedience school, and now knows how to behave itself. Definitely in my top-10 favorite post-2015 brow…

> I use Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, along five other browsers

Interesting - would you mind sharing what you use the others for?

Re: Waterfox Browser

#42

Post by solarkraft »

iota8 wrote: post #7

Not much information on the home page on why to use this and not Firefox. As this is derivative of Firefox, then what does it add over Firefox?

The main point, which many people are looking for, is that it’s a version of Firefox maintained by anyone except Mozilla.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#44

Post by bArray »

overeater wrote: post #2

Several things make me skeptical about this browser. 1) Homepage is a bit uncared for. The Copyright shows "2020" at the bottom, the top screenshot looks doctored rather than being a real screenshot. 2) It's owned by an ad marketing platform, System1, as noted in the FAQ. On the plus side, the Github repository is active.

The reviews are pretty great. Definitely legit.

> “It’s incredibly difficult for new browsers to penetrate the market, but there’s one such browser called Waterfox, which is attempting to gain a foothold into the market by claiming to be the fastest browser in existence by leveraging on the 64-bit architecture of the latest operating systems.” - Can A New Web Browser Break Into the Market? / London Datastore

Woah, they must be leveraging that new 64 bit technology everybody has been talking about!

> “In a week where we celebrate the best of the British technology industry, we speak to young developer Alex Kontos about building a successful web browser, a search engine that gives money to charity, Microsoft Edge and more.” - From bedroom coder to building a Google search engine rival / Trusted Reviews

Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge!

Re: Waterfox Browser

#45

Post by solarkraft »

iszomer wrote: post #21

There's also LibreWolf.

LibreWolf may be a great and private browser for simple websites, but it’s definitely not your gateway to modern web applications. It locks down so much through a configuration override that a good chunk of modern web functionality just won’t work (WebRTC, for example). I gave up after about 5 times of looking up a problem and changing the configuration file without an end in sight.

They go a bit far for my taste.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#47

Post by solarkraft »

duskwuff wrote: post #22
Jowsey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its big thing originally was being a 64-bit port of Firefox. I assume it's still based on Firefox in some way, based on the name, but not really sure what it brings to the table anymore, besides some minor stuff you can already get with extensions.

Its thing nowadays is being a fork of a Firefox release old enough to still support XUL. Which means it's effectively a 4+ year old version of Firefox, with no renderer isolation and no support for most web features added in the last four years.

> effectively a 4+ year old version of Firefox, with no renderer isolation and no support for most web features added in the last four years

Okay, hilarious. “Impressive that they’re keeping it up to date while maintaining XUL support”, I thought. Never mind.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#48

Post by solarkraft »

As pointed out in another comment [0], apparently it’s extremely outdated. Other comments describe it as unstable and lacking Apple Silicon builds. If you’re just looking for a version of Firefox without the user-hostile parts, this ain’t exactly it.

From my months-old research such a thing doesn’t really seem to exist yet, but I definitely think it should. It could perhaps initially be shipped as a set of patches to be done on top of an existing Firefox installation.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816443

Re: Waterfox Browser

#49

Post by WithinReason »

ev1 wrote: post #25
bscphil wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, context for this? I take a pretty thorough scalpel to removing any traces of sponsored content from Firefox, and it never occurred to me that they might have ads in the address bar. Is there a previous discussion an announcement about this?

You want both of these to be false. browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored browser.urlbar.sponsoredTopSites

Thanks.

They were already off for me, and I don't remember being asked about enabling them after an install...

Re: Waterfox Browser

#50

Post by csande17 »

rogual wrote: post #40

"No telemetry / We don't need to know what you do within your browser." OK, good. "Limited Data Collection / We try and take the bare minimum amount of information to keep things running smoothly. " Wait, what? So which is it?

If I were to take a guess (just reading charitably, I haven't actually used Waterfox): they're probably trying to say that the browser doesn't make any requests whose sole purpose is to report your information to them. No telemetry. But browsers do have to send some network requests to their developers for stuff like automatic updates, and they do have to log some of the information received—for example, to tell if someone is trying to hack the update server—but they'll try and keep that to a minimum.
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