Waterfox is independent again: https://www.waterfox.net/en-US/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterf...

And System1 are an “ad-tech” company but the term should be used loosely. The ownership made sense as they are a search engine aggregator and they own a bunch of old school search engines like DogPile, InfoSpace etc. Nothing to do with what people associate ad-tech with, i.e. tracking you across the web or collecting personal data.