MrAlex94

Not quite independent as it’s a meta-search, but I developed a subscription based one at search.waterfox.net. Pays for the infrastructure costs and remains ad/tracking free.

Waterfox (which I maintain), Tor Browser, Mull (based on Tor) and I assume LibreWolf as well?

I understand why Mozilla have started implementing these features, it seems to have more mass market appeal than not - look at how popular “AI” powered browsers have become.

But boy does it not add extra effort removing these features every time there’s a new roll-out and it’s not done the best way IMO. I feel as if these features would go down better if Mozilla actually notified the user that they’re available and then offered whether to enable them or not (could have them enabled by default for new users). That way you’re still giving a choice, but in a more respectful manner.

If anyone is interested I’ve gutted all the more obscene stuff out of Waterfox and have instead left the useful ones such a ML translation, which is opt-in.

Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours. Feels like you somehow have to intuitively know how something works (unlikely) or do a web search on how to use everything instead of having it shown to you nicely.

You can see here[1], I'll avoid pasting again. But yes, can still use a Mozilla account and the website is getting a refurb - I will add a third hard thing in computer science.. letting people know all the things you've actually built :')

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43206110

Just an FYI for anyone who is interested, I’ve also been doing the same for Waterfox.

Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].

For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.

Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.

Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…

Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.

Does it? If it’s the same WiFi chip used in other M4 Mac’s then it’s still limited to 160MHz:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep268652e6...

You and sersi are both welcome!

Not just `about:config`, which is limited to non-release builds, but via enabling “Secret Settings” when you enable debug mode: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mobile/android/fenix...

This allowed access from the standard settings page which you can see in this release, it’s the same setting just exposed instead of hidden.

I think Nimbus experiments also might have exposed the setting.

While this was measured in a slightly different implementation via Oblivious DNS[1]:

> The first thing that we can say with confidence is that the additional encryption is marginal. We know this because we randomly selected 10,000 domains from the Tranco million dataset and measured both encryption of the A record with a different public key, as well as its decryption. The additional cost between a proxied DoH query/response and its ODoH counterpart is consistently less than 1ms at the 99th percentile.

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/#what-about-perfor...

Not sure why it took so long for Mozilla to expose the setting on Android, it's been a 'secret' setting for a long time. In fact, sometimes they let features ride the rails for a little bit too long IMO.

For Waterfox for Android I exposed the setting by default and also added an addition DNS over Oblivious HTTP setting (DoOH) which uses Fastly as the relay (they host and control it, for privacy sanitisation) and Cloudflare as the resolver.

When I rebased all of Waterfox’s changes onto the latest ESR branch, disabling AI features was my top priority. I only kept translations, and even that’s opt-in. I think most Firefox features, especially anything AI-related, should be opt-in by default. This feels like part of a broader shift in software expectations - when applications start acting autonomously, users should know exactly what’s happening and explicitly consent to that behavior.

That figure from GPT-5 seems to be slightly off, according to the Irish Times: “At least 258 Irish-born soldiers have won the Medal of Honor since its inception. Of those, 148 won them during the civil war – 14 in one day when the Union Navy raided the Confederate port of Mobile, Alabama, in 1864.” https://web.archive.org/web/20250504103715/https://www.irish...

Tor has had zero telemetry since its inception and I’ve been disabling telemetry in Waterfox for as long as I can remember - which is almost 15 years.

There were Firefox forks before that as well doing the same thing.

As it currently stands there should be over a billion devices that natively support JPEG-XL, as it was introduced in all Apple OSs since September 2023[1].

On the web alone it should be close to a billion users with support for JXL due to Safari’s market share.

[1]: https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-how-it-started-how-its-g...

I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.

They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.

It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?

At the end of the day, before implementing support for streaming services via DRM, this was the most requested feature.

Privacy is a sliding scale and the idea that it's absolute privacy or nothing else isn't helpful IMO. If people want that, they should use Tor as nothing comes close.

I’ve been running Waterfox[1] for over 14 years and it’s as popular as ever.

1: https://www.waterfox.net

For what it’s worth, after I bought one, around five other people I know got them, varying models from the Steel HR to Nova, and haven’t been made aware of any issues. Of course, personal experience doesn’t apply to the mass of products, and these are all UK SKUs, so who knows if issues vary between countries as well?

Overall everyone has been happy though and I haven’t seen Withings come up on HN which is surprising tbh!

Would Withings[1] watches not fit the bill? I have a ScanWatch and the battery life lasts almost a month.

1: https://www.withings.com/

This reads very strangely to me, borderline idolatry if not just outright.

It’s framed as if every single word expelled by Sam is a morsel of genius to be carefully examined before being devoured and savoured.

To me it boils down to how ineffective corporate PR is and how even a little bit more straightforward conversation comes across infinitely better. Corporate speak seems to be ambiguous and actually quite difficult to parse, so anything away from that seems so much more accessible.

But honestly this post is so aggrandising I can’t help but feel the author is hoping Sam might glimpse at it and give him a pat on the back well done.

Although that may be the case, your privacy policy and terms of service appear to be identical.

Furthermore, you have specified governing jurisdiction but have (as far as I can ascertain) provided no information regarding any legal entity to which this service pertains.

While GP’s statement was exaggerated, granting your Stripe API to a random internet service with what appears to be no accountability is not a good idea.

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

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

Waterfox is not months behind? We follow ESR releases fairly promptly.

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, 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?

FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.

> 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…

Fundamentally I think having people pay for a browser is a hard sell. I do think complementary services being sold to fund the browser are a good idea though.

E.g. VPN, search, bookmarking service - great. Charge for them, have the money go into browser dev, focus on privacy and be done with it.

You aren't wrong, at all, but as mentioned I have run into issues with this in the past. I don't have enough income for the rigmarole Mozilla would put us through, even though I attempted in the past.

FWIW in regards to features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206110

I had solicitors involved, they basically said you are in the right, but they have more money. Not a hill worth dying on.