Is anyone who is more familiar with Waterfox and LibreWolf able to objectively expand on the differences between these projects?
It sounds like the unsigned binary may be a maturity issue that will get tackled based on the mission statement(educated guess?).
Would greatly appreciate anyone with more knowledge about these projects elaborating.
While it's difficult to track Waterfox's stance, this is from one of the earlier blog posts on what appears to be a hot button topic for users:
I’ve never wanted or tried to have Waterfox appear as a privacy tool or anything more than what it is. That’s for hyper specialised tools such as Tor. People have extrapolated more from Waterfox themselves.
I never wanted Waterfox to be a part of the hyper-privacy community. It would just feel like standards that would be impossible to uphold, especially for something such as a web browser on the internet. Throughout the years people have always asked about Waterfox and privacy, and if they’ve ever wanted more than it can afford, I’ve always pushed them to use Tor. Waterfox was here for customisations and speed, with a good level of privacy.
I can respect what the community fights for, but I don’t think I can respect how they sometimes fight for it or how they act when they believe they are wronged. Harassment and foul words seem to be the normal, as I’ve experienced. As far as I’m aware, Waterfox has never been listed anywhere as a privacy tool, and rightly so.
Note the Waterfox commenter in this thread is not calling it "privacy" tool, while focusing on aspects that carry "trust". These are indeed distinct.
My use case: I mainly run the Unity desktop on Linux, both on traditional Ubuntu and on the Ubuntu Unity newly-official remix. On other distros, I use Xfce and I am trying to make a macOS-like layout via the Docklike Taskbar and AppMenu panel plugins.
Waterfox works with external global menus, like Firefox used to in the pre-Quantum era when Ubuntu used Unity itself.
LibreWolf does not.
So, I removed LibreWolf.
I don't care much about the telemetry stuff. Waterfox survived the Foxstuck outage fine and unaffected:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/18/foxstuck_firefox_brow...
That's a win.
I adopted Waterfox because I made extensive use of XUL extensions and Mozilla disabled them in Quantum. They still worked in Waterfox, for years, so I stayed.
Waterfox seems to work harder for its users. Mozilla doesn't care.
Waterfox: I came for the extensions, but I stay for the UI improvements and greater reliability.
From a comment[1] I’ve made before for this kind of comparison:
“Now, ignoring feature differences between all the forks out there, I'd like to present a different perspective and consideration that I think gets overlooked when comparing forks like Waterfox to other forks (if I am incorrect regarding Librewolf, someone please correct me).
* Waterfox provides signed binaries for download. Librewolf (and most of the rest) do not. Checksum's are all well and good, but IMO, not enough. Code signing provides trust.
* Librewolf does not provide auto-updates. There are 3rd party tools out there, but IMHO that brings in its own set of problems, and breaks the chain-of-trust.
* The most important one that I believe, maybe apart from Pale Moon, only Waterfox does, is offers accountability. There is (and has been since 2012) a legal entity behind Waterfox. That used to be Waterfox Limited, then it was System1 and now BrowserWorks (the entity I control). Laws must be abided and the end user actually has an entity to hold accountable. GDPR, CCPA, the rest are things that actually need to be followed. The other projects, who are you really going to hold accountable if things go wrong? To me this is super important because a browser is used for sensitive information. It's just not worth the risk otherwise. This also goes hand in hand with the code signing.
* Above all else, Waterfox has been around for 12 years now.
Don't get me wrong, things like EV code signing certs are a bit of a racket, and yeah you can jump in and code audit all those other forks too. But really, push comes to shove, they can just disappear into the aether.”
[1] https://reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/14seevh/waterfox_or_l...