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Comment by MrAlex94 | Hacker News Reader

> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive. Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website?

IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…

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Wait, aren't you a developer of Waterfox? Why don't you just tell us...

I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206110

(Just to avoid c+p massive blocks of text)

FWIW, I too bounced after looking around the website and not seeing any concrete information about how it's different from upstream (long before reading this article). Maybe you could add a short bullet point list right on the home page, it shouldn't require much work?

well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess to start with.

And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.

Yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable with Waterfox because of that episode. In the HN thread the creator responded to complaints about this privacy-unfriendly turn by saying that they "tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as" being about privacy or user control. That's fine, but an immediate turnoff for me even now that the advertising company is apparently out of the picture.

If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user control, who knows where it gets sold next or what the dev adds to it next?

Edit: I just realized that the dev is the one who wrote the grandparent comment. Maybe you have an explanation that would help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343476

Well the issue I’ve always found is that privacy is a sliding scale. At the time especially, everyone was after “absolute” privacy - i.e. everything Tor offers. But people were coming in to use Waterfox with that expectation and it wasn’t meeting it - but communicating how “much” privacy you’re being offered is difficult. I did settle on the current terminology and when people ask in user forums I try and make it clear that it’s a balance of usability and privacy - as much as possible without breaking websites.

Not sure I agree with your understanding wrt Waterfox not being about user control? Always has been and the feature set matches that and that hasn’t changed.

Well, this is the opening line from that comment:

> > Those needs are privacy related and having control over the software you use.

> That’s fair enough, but I’ve tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as such to try and avoid issues like this.

I guess maybe you were only talking about privacy and not about "having control over the software"?

Well, System1 was/is a search aggregator. That falls under ad-tech but at the time no-one cared about the former and only the latter.

Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot of sense.

I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I never understood why people were so in arms about it?

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