71–80 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, and I'm not saying it's good for privacy. But Firefox in its default setting is also bordering unusable, inserting ads in the address bar! It's incredible that an advertising company does better than a for-profit owned by a non-profit in this regard.
Whoa, borderline unusable because of something Chrome has effectively been doing for a long time? https://imgur.com/a/baXZDrN
I keep it installed because the old pre-webextension version of downthemall can download some things the new version doesn't. But I only use it like once a month or so. I don't see any reason for me to use it on a regular basis.
Waterfox G3+ supports installing bootstrapped/XPCOM extensions :-)
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, th…
Just thought it was a nice way to get people familiar with Waterfox since - at least at the time (years ago now) I wasn't too sure how to introduce people to it.
> Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge!
I never did, that's just the structure of the sentence mentioning that they also talk about Edge in the article.
The problem is, it's very old, and with Firefox, the good stuff comes with the last versions. Especially, modern Firefox is wicked fast, while just a few versions before, it was less so. The difference is _staggering_. I think there is a space for add ons to setup Firefox to be more privacy focused. It's easier to maintain than a fork: compiling on so many targets such a huge software is very hard.
On my phone, I have the newest version of Firefox Fennec and IceCatMobile (ancient and barely supported) - they both launch and function at, as far as I can see, exactly the same speed. Where is this speedup you mention actually found?
The latest rendering improvements are showing great results, and hardware acceleration on Linux is now on part with Windows, so it's fantastic to use on a modern laptop.
By reading the subtitle 'a perfect ballance between privacy and usability' i think that it wont have privacy and might be less user friendly that other browsers. Also, the statement that you try to collect less data doesn't says anything about privacy.
I've used a recent version of WF yesteryear on Mac and Windows, both with the firewall installed and guess what. The Firewall started notifying numerous outgoing connection attempts even before I opened any webpage! WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers. But that's not the end of the story. I've installed the classic version of WF so that it would run on my older M…
* OpenH264 Codec for H264 playback
* Widevine (if you enable DRM, it's disabled by default on Waterfox)
* Extension blocklists
* Phishing/malware website blocklists
* Certificate downloads and HSTS Preload Lists
* Captive portal detection
* And a few other security related bits and bobs I can't remember off the top of my head.
I did try to migrate to offline dumps so these things would only get updated at browser update time, but it causes a few issues with the browser doing so.
> WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers.
That would be rather shocking to me if it's true - the browser should be making requests to download things, but not upload anything? If this isn't the case do let me know what is going where as that is most definitely not by design!
> WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD.
That is definitely not ideal, but unfortunately Classic is very long in the tooth now and compatibility is getting harder with each release.
Sorry you had those issues though, definitely not what we want happening.
I don't see any point in using Waterfox in 2021.
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…
"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?
My little snitch popped up like 20 times for callbacks to mozilla and other hosts..
Started fighting macOS telemetry and refused transition to Linux partially because of absence of LS alternative. Since Open Snitch I happily run my personal computer with PureOS. https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
The amount of system mothership calling on any platform is mind boggling. And everything has "rational" and "it is inevitable" attached to it. My Firefox looks like Christmas Tree from extensions and my about:config is taking too long to set properly. What a beautiful future we are creating. :)