Waterfox Browser
waterfox.net
waterfox.net
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.
I also think it's silly to put on your website, but I am not a lawyer and don't know if it has any actual purpose.
Copyright renewal is a real thing. Copyright years generally get refreshed whenever the content changes.
Not in most jurisdictions, no. What's your country where copyright renewal is still a thing? (no judgement here, despite all my hatred for copyright i'd rather have copyright renewal than copyright until 50y after death of all editors/compositors/authors as we have in Europe)
Moreover, under United States law, new editions of a preexisting work are considered "derivative works" and in these cases "the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work." [1]
SIGNIFICANTLY, this U.S. government source explicitly mentions the following as cases of derivative works which allow for a new copyright:
* A new version of an existing computer program
* A revision of a website
The new copyright on the derivative work "covers only the additions, changes, or other new material appearing for the first time in the work."
In other words, by creating a derivative work via updating an existing computer program or modifying a website, you absolutely gain a new copyright on any new material and you absolutely can and should update the copyright date under U.S. law.
People urging the contrary, at least insofar as they are talking about the United States or governments with similar copyright regimes are dead wrong, and jcranmer and garmaine are right and unfairly downvoted.
Thanks, i was not aware that was still a thing!
In US copyright law, there are three dates that control copyright: 120 years from creation (first fixation), 95 years from first publication, or life + 70 years. If any one of those terms expire [1], the work moves into the public domain.
Affixing an earlier copyright date affords no advantages. Pre-1976 copyright reform, flubbing the formalities means you lose copyright entirely. After that reform, you still keep copyright, but instead you lose out on some ability to recuperate losses, and you give your opponent extra legal ammunition in any copyright infringement cases.
[1] Strictly speaking, life + 70 years actually rules when the author is determined. If you read the law carefully, once the fixation/publication threshold is crossed, it is now the burden of proof of the copyright owner to demonstrate that life + 70 hasn't happened yet, and furthermore to demonstrate that the alleged infringer failed to do due diligence to determine the death date of the author. In practice, it could end up really being a lesser-of-all-three situation, but we aren't going to get any case law on this until 2074 at the earliest, since life + 70 doesn't start until 1978.
It's SVG, so not a screenshot at all.
> “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!
Waterfox is a project that has been around for long enough (~2011) that 64-bit was actually a thing people cared about.
> they even give money to Microsoft Edge!
They are saying they covered several topics in the interview, of which one was charity, and another was Microsoft Edge.
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.
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.
LibreWolf seems like an attempt at this: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
I think the end game for this probably ought to be an interface that appears post-install and asks you to choose a set of privacy-friendly options (which may break things), or enable all web technologies (which may impact privacy). That seems the user-respecting thing to do to me.
Still, though, I'm glad that privacy-by-default, no unexpected connections out of the box, is something that someone is working on.
There are two versions of Waterfox: Classic, based on Gecko 56 that has backported security patches (but is not recommended to be used unless you are desperate to use XUL extensions) and the 3rd Generation (G3) based on ESR releases.
Waterfox Classic is based on XUL and while we back port security patches as best we can, I always try motivate existing users to migrate to the newer versions. I’m not going to force an upgrade on Classic users as it will break their current setup and instead leave it their choice.
We follow the ESR release currently for “current” versions (the default download on the website) and since ESR78 didn’t support ARM on macOS there were no builds for it.
Now that we have the beta out for the ESR91 version, ARM support for macOS is available: https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G4.0.0b2
I’d like to think that Waterfox G3+ does fit in your criteria.
* There is disgusting clickbait and spam on the new tab page by default, thanks to bundling Pocket's article recommendations. Many of these are sponsored suggestions (a euphemism that means "advertisement"), but ironically these are scarcely more annoying than the actual suggestions.
* The top sites feature on the new tab page, intended to provide easy access to the sites you use the most, is now infested with sponsored recommendations like Amazon and Ebay.
* The URL bar is now infested with sponsored suggestions, even if you have searching from that bar turned off!
* The have made major blunders in their handling of "experiments" and telemetry. They broke all extensions because they failed to update a certificate (after shipping Firefox with a signing requirement for extensions that can't be disabled), and shipped an extension directly to users via their hotpatching feature that implemented a sponsored tie-in with a TV SHOW which manipulated the text on web pages, a major breach of trust in their use of hotpatching.
More minor or borderline cases:
* They have shipped many of these anti-features and stuff that belongs in user-installable extensions as part of the source code of Firefox itself. This bloats the browser, makes it harder for potential forkers to remove the code, and makes it harder for them to reverse course in the future should they decide to undo their disastrous series of decisions.
* They default to Google as a search engine because Google pays them lots of money, not because they believe that's the best search engine for their users to use. They were using Yahoo a few years ago.
* They generate pointless UI churn, presumably because their design team has nothing else to do. Most of these features have been received poorly by the majority of Firefox users invested enough to speak out, suggesting that they have some other motive than making their users happy.
* Needless removal of features that arguably do belong in a browser: detection of RSS feeds, compact mode for the GUI, the ability to use CSS to restyle the browser interface (now hidden behind a "deprecated" toggle)
* On top of everything else, the horrible communication from Mozilla has made everything so much more hostile than it already was. They outright denied at first, for example, that the "new tab suggestions intended to improve the user experience" were advertisements.
* The mobile transition has been a disaster. They've had like 4 or 5 different "editions" of Firefox over the last few years as they tried to decide what their strategy was, and now that they've set on one, they deprecated the only version of their browser that supported add-ons on mobile without a replacement, and now almost 30 versions later the overwhelming majority of addons are still not supported. And the justification for all this, refactoring to make the browser faster, didn't materialize. I tested both the old and newest browser on objective benchmarks and saw a difference of less than 10%, and the UI of the new browser was noticeably slower.
However, it doesn't bear at all on the question of whether the actions are user hostile. Any change known to the developers to negatively impact the utility of end users is user hostile. Maybe a program like Firefox can't exist in 2021 without being ... essentially adware ... and if so I think that's sad, but it's not a reason to redefine our terms to make it not user hostile to begin with!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047170
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800634
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554083
And the one on acquisition by System1:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321
It's my choice for "sandbox" browser - as in doing all stuff that I wouldn't want to do on Vivaldi.
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.
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.
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 browsers.
Interesting - would you mind sharing what you use the others for?
I love the Web and I believe strongly in Any Browser, so I regularly test in a whole variety of browsers to ensure compatibility.
I try to dogfood this as much as possible. For example, I'm posting this with Firefox 3.6.
I wouldn't recommend it, but that's just because I wouldn't recommend any web browser right now.
Well, Waterfox is owned by an advertising company.
It's incredible that an advertising company does better than a for-profit owned by a non-profit in this regard.
Edit: just to add to this, my understanding is that Mozilla uses (abuses?) their trademark on Firefox to keep the distributions in line. If you distribute a version of Firefox that's been patched to remove anti-features, you can't call it Firefox.
Indeed, it would be rather surprising if they did, as I'm an Arch user as well and they have not disabled the sponsored new tab suggestions or the Pocket article recommendations. Hard to say what would be beyond the pale for the Arch maintainers.
From what I can tell from this thread, they are currently selectively enabling this for certain users. Maybe it just hasn't been enabled for you yet, or you're in a region (non-US) that doesn't get it enabled?
It isn't a patch to Firefox just configuration.
browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored
browser.urlbar.sponsoredTopSites
They were already off for me, and I don't remember being asked about enabling them after an install...
browser.urlbar.trimURLs
False.
It is possible that I'm so culturally eccentric that the obstruction of useful information fails to appeal to me.
There really isn't a good web browser.
It appears that Waterfox is one of the few ways to use the legacy extensions that Firefox removed the support for and to use a browser that Mozilla doesn't have control over.
I'd maybe also look at GNU IceCat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
It's actually curious to see a discussion about a fork of Firefox, since a little bit ago i personally felt that there might just be a rise of more forks and attempts to abandon Mozilla due to their recent behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785896
Firefox also has some telemetry which Waterfox cuts out.
We quickly heard from Mozilla's lawyers: "Eliminate the Fox from your name or we sue you!".
So we abandoned the project, but seeing the website you posted, my concept has lived on, and the gitlab seems to be pretty active as well!
They go a bit far for my taste.
Also, the statement that you try to collect less data doesn't says anything about privacy.
* 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.
Yes, they're probably the most complex piece of software humans have ever created. That being said, it seems like it would be possible to create a browser that handles all of the most common use cases, so ~90% of your browsing experience.
Sure, maybe you need years and dozens of engineers for the final 10% but who cares about that bit? Wouldn't people be willing to accept this feature tradeoff for a new, user-friendly browser?
A web browser these days is arguably of similar complexity.
If you omit video playing, you've prevented people from using YouTube and Netflix. If you omit compositing graphics on top of this video, you've again prevented YouTube and Netflix from showing UI.
If you omit canvas and SVG, fancy modern parallax scrolling sites will not load.
If you omit WebGL, another half of modern sites which just use it for a rotating logo won't load.
Etc, etc... you really can't release a non-100% feature-full browser these days.
This is very similar to the behavior I saw "random freezes during page load/render" on a different OS.
Overall, it was very fast on my system, except for this specific slowdown activity.
In my testing with it, I found it to be very fast, and a little unstable but the XUL support was a big plus.
Waterfox G3+ supports installing bootstrapped/XPCOM extensions :-)
Okay, hilarious. “Impressive that they’re keeping it up to date while maintaining XUL support”, I thought. Never mind.
Waterfox supports extensions that are no longer supported by Firefox.
I don't see any point in using Waterfox in 2021.
I customised Firefox fairly heavily, with an assortment of over a dozen addons I'd just accumulated over the years. Firefox Quantum broke all but 2 of them and destroyed the program's usefulness to me.
Waterfox imported my profile intact and allows me to keep my customisations.
I have a vertical tab bar on the left (flat _not_ hierarchical) which is also merged with the bookmarks toolbar, also flattened. I have two download managers, one for ordinary small downloads in a tab, and another that can resume downloads, segment and parallelise large downloads, detect and bypass redirect pages and so on. Another addon automatically detects [Next] links and preloads the content into the first page, so you a big single page instead of multiple sub-pages. Another supplies anonymous login details from a shared public database. Another sorts and dedupes my several thousand bookmarks.
Oh, and on Ubuntu with Unity, Waterfox's menu bar automatically appears in my top panel. Firefox for some baffling reason hides its menu bar, but if enabled, it doesn't go into the top panel and instead wastes a strip of my laptop's fairly small screen.
And so on and so on. Firefox Quantum destroyed all this and delivers an IMHO fairly poor user experience which is as bad as Chrome's and in no way preferable to Chrome.
I have found some workarounds, for instance a vertical tab bar, but I have to enable a setting that enables user customisation, then I have to add a subdirectory to my profile and put some CSS in it in order to hide the crappy horizontal tabs and the pointless header row in the sidebar. It's a pain. WebExtensions are sad crippled little things compared to the power of XUL and they don't allow you to to really change the UI of the browser.
My impression is that today's Firefox developers don't really know or understand what people did with the tools that turn-of-the-century Mozilla provided us with. Since they didn't have a clue what was possible, they decided to rip the whole lot out and fob us off with pathetic Chrome-style extensions, Chrome-style tabs, and Chrome-style lack of customisability.
So I switched to a power user's browser that still lets me do this stuff.
There is no cost to me and contrary to what other commenters claim I can see no performance difference whatsoever. I have kept Firefox around on my Linux boxes because Github bitches about Waterfox, and apart from being much more clunky, Firefox 93 gives me nothing at all. No better speed, no better stability, about 1% of the selection of addons and they're crippled things.
TBH I thought this would be a temporary thing, but it's been four years now and Waterfox Classic is still going strong.
Mozilla, OTOH, has totally lost its way and seems to be flailing.
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?
But its a guess. Would be nice to have devs pitch in here.
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. :)