MrAlex94

A few criticisms of LibreWolf:

* There is no legal entity behind the project. Should anything ever happen with the project (it can happen, even if unlikely), there are no legal ramifications.

* The binaries aren't signed. Yes, code signing is a bit of a racket, but there is some merit in it.

* There is no auto-update mechanism. Might not seem like a big deal, but IMO it is, especially on Windows where you're recommended to rely on 3rd party client to update the browser for you. You've now added a middle man, and since the binaries are not signed... well there's no guarantee you aren't downloading a malicious binary.

Not to hang around like a bad smell every time they come up, but just think it’s worth noting they are not open source anymore, instead being “source available”. Really gives me the old school “greenwashing” vibes Microsoft used to do with their Shared Source licenses. Poor showing considering they used others work to get to where they are, then shut the door when others started doing the same.

I would say feel free to give Waterfox a try - I’ve tried to strike the balance of useable web and privacy, with the added enhancement of Oblivious DNS enabled by default.

I believe a lot of the work comes from: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox

P.S. the project you linked is no longer FOSS.

Not to be a stickler, but just a note it no longer counts as FOSS or even open source I believe, with their new licence: https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components...

It’s left a bad taste in my mouth since they used the work of others to get to where they are, then when others do the same, they don’t like it.

> I still think that a more secure version of XUL could offer a better user experience

In a way, webextension experiments are exactly that; you have complete access to all the “privileged” APIs in the browser, just like XUL extensions did. Problem is you need to toggle some prefs and use Dev or Nightly builds.

Isn’t it going through some controversy of its own at the moment? I understand they want to “source available” rather than keep open source features they’ve developed, because others are forking their work.

The irony being not only are they a fork, their initial feature set was from existing add-ons that they were just downloading/installing by default.

Title slightly changed to fit character limit. Original title: Look back on the history of Tree Style Tab until the performance improvement at version 4.0

Not that I could ever tell - I did it years ago for Waterfox but dropped it after finding no performance improvements after migrating away from Intel's C++ compiler toolchain.

LibreWolf, AFAIK, has been hyper aggressive on privacy preferences (to the detriment of a useable web sometimes) and is its USP.

Coming from years of experience doing this with Waterfox - I would not recommend using anything like this.

I used to be quite aggressive with compiler optimisations - but all you are really doing is introducing instability and more often than not, performance regressions.

For the latest release, I actually started including polyhedral optimisation provided by the LLVM Polly project, but the effort resulted in essentially 0 performance gain. It was to be expected, as polly isn't really going to net general performance improvements, especially with the type of work a browser is doing.

It's also VERY easy to mislead yourself when adding these optimisations by getting a good run on a benchmark once or twice, yet you could try another run and get a different result. I am guilty of this myself, it took a long time to realise the mistakes I was making.

The reality was, I found, running on fresh device in comparison with Firefox, was almost no difference. The majority of performance improvements came from the engineering effort put in by Mozilla themselves and they are VERY good at that. The devs are also conscious of the available compiler optimisations and make a very good effort to include any that make a difference.

> Compiler optimizations include AVX, AES, LTO and PGO.

Firefox already does LTO and PGO, and for majority of the code, where AVX is beneficial, it is already included with code dispatch if the CPU supports it (for example with media codecs). The same goes for AES in the NSS library.

Does that mean you can't get Clang/LLVM to generate AVX instructions? Yes, I'm sure it does. Does it actually make a meaningful difference? No. Not that I've found from years of doing this and eventually just abandoning it.

The only time I ever saw big, proper gains from compiler optimisation alone was when I was compiling Waterfox with Intel's C++ compiler and using auto dispatching with the Qax [1] flag. Intel were doing some magic there. But the effort to get the Firefox codebase compiled with it was nothing short of sisyphean and essentially an exercise in masochism.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/cpp-compiler/de...

> Is there any sort of corporate structure around one of the forks?

Yes, I have one for Waterfox. I have had one since 2012, first as Waterfox Limited and now as BrowserWorks Ltd (registered in the UK).

When people ask for comparison between forks, as often happens in the community, I’ve actually found it interesting that none of them actually have anyone to hold accountable in a legal sense, and I’ve started to lean into that as a benefit of Waterfox.

A browser is an incredibly privileged piece of software; it’s used to access very sensitive information, but it doesn’t seem to be a consideration a lot of the time about “who” is behind these forks.

I’ve got a few product launches that I hope will get me out under the thumb of middlemen and the murky world of search engine partnerships, and with that, hopefully build up a small team to have sustainable growth and a viable mainstream alternative.

Waterfox will be 13 in March, and one pie in the sky dream was to eventually be able to have a completely detached front end with frequent improvements submitted upstream to the browser engine. So somewhat similar to what you seem to be asking for.

Sorry, should’ve probably added a text description.

Hono is a JavaScript framework designed to run on (but not just) Edge runtimes. It’s nice due to it being very “lightweight”. It was mainly for server side functionality but this release adds more front end functionality, which I find quite welcome.

Personally I have found this works well if you’re targeting those platforms. For example, I use it on Cloudflare Pages with Page Functions and it works a dream.

I haven’t found it to be a write once target anywhere platform (for example, serving static files differs between platforms), but it makes it significantly less effort to migrate to a new platform if necessary, which is always nice.

Happy to chime in regarding LibreWolf and Waterfox, as it comes up alot in our support forums[1]:

This question comes up every now and then, I'll base my currently updated reply starting with my previous response[2]:

> 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

> 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.

Separately, I'd say the end goals of each browser are different. Librewolf seems to aim for privacy on a rolling release. Tor and Mull will both target ESR (extended support releases, which is where Mozilla aim for my enterprise friendly releases of features being set and instead security/bug patches applied only). All of them will sacrifice compatibility for privacy/security. From my above comment, I'd go with Tor if you're willing to sacrifice speed, Mull if you want better speed but broken websites. After all a web browser probably accesses the most _sensitive_ data it can, I'd put my faith in a piece of a software run by a legal entity so you can have some legal recourse on matters.

Waterfox's goal in terms of privacy is a usable web that still leans heavily to privacy but doesn't want to sacrifice the web experience for that to work.

Waterfox has done a lot to reach that, from careful curation of preferences to supplemental infrastructure such as DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH). These aren't just features that "might" help; there's real benefit to it. For example, users have reported being able to access censored websites when using Waterfox. In my opinion, I've reached Waterfox's goal perfectly here: privacy and web compatibility.

Then, there's all the other "sugar" on top:

- Customization

- Reverting features removed by Mozilla but are genuinely useful/should've remained in Firefox.

- Adding features when Mozilla is slow to do so (better JPEG-XL support for one).

- The only fork that AFAIK that supports DRM content, for watching Netflix, Prime Video etc. Considering how difficult this was to achieve I doubt any will get support any time soon either.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/18g8tez/comment/k...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/14seevh/comment/j...

Web rendering would be Blink, with V8 being the JavaScript engine. I believe they have their own UI rendering process.

I know of another company that does something similar for the UI process, but with WebKit instead as the base:

https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight#rocket-dual-high...

* Closed source

* Requires an account to use

An absolute shame in this day and age. But I have a feeling it's a requirement considering they raised $20M before even having a product ready.

Which leads to another point - what are they going to do to make sure they make a return for their investors?

Fascinating! His house was standing at 88 Mile End Road until 1959, to provide better access to a parking lot[1].

[1] https://romanroadlondon.com/captain-cooks-east-london-home-o...

Does it actually allow installation of WebExtensions on iOS? I thought that was currently against the App Store rules?

Edit: I can’t find any hard and fast rule about browsers not being allowed WebExtensions on iOS, so interesting to see for sure.

> what other forks has support for that

Waterfox has had these features for a few years now.

Firefox still supports it - there are even pending patches for animation support. Unless it has recently changed, it’s only available on nightly builds + a preference toggle.

I pulled all the patches in to Waterfox and have had full support for JPEG XL for nearly a year now.

I’m happy to expand on it - maybe someone else can chime in as well.

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...

> Some constructive criticism, if you're open to it:

Definitely, much appreciated. You aren’t wrong about the fluff. We did user studies and showed people responded really well to this kind of landing page. I’ll see if I can have some more “hard facts”, but the average user doesn’t really understand the terminology which is why it’s dumbed down on this page - which essentially equates to fluff I suppose.

For the blog, it’s in the navigation, not sure how to have it more prominent without it being obnoxiously placed? Open to suggestions.

For the community, good points. I’ll make sure the subreddit and GitHub are more easily accessible as that’s where the community is based around and it’s very active.

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.

Disclaimer: I develop Waterfox.

I think it’s worth noting that Librewolf provides unsigned binaries and at least on Windows, you need to trust a third party service to provide automatic updates.

Well, this will provide signed binaries and a "native" (to the browser) update service that doesn’t rely on a third party to update it.

Librewolf breaks trust (for lack of a better term) by not offering both of those options.

You just have to assume the binary you download isn’t compromised (maybe you could argue checking the hash is enough) and that the third-party updating service won’t serve you a compromised update.

Years ago, I had the idea to create a clear-net version of Tor, e.g. Tor Browser without the Tor network (was called Aegis Digital, I believe The Epoch Times interviewed me about it). Separate to Waterfox, the idea would be ramp up the privacy to the max.

The problem is, when you did that, many websites would break in the most bizarre of ways. Even now, it still breaks a lot of the web. Couple that with a well known VPN and large swathes of the web are going to be difficult to access.

I'm sure this may go down well with the privacy crowd, but for the general user it was and still is a hard pill to swallow. I wound down any attempts, figuring a balance of privacy and usability would be better and if I were to offer this, why not just point users to use Tor instead?

I figure this is a good opportunity for Mullvad to capture its VPN users and shift them onto a platform they control. Not necessarily a good or bad thing, as I know VPN providers try to launch their own browsers and even some browser vendors launching their own VPN to capture the maximum value out of their users.

I’ve been maintaining a “soft” fork now for about 12 years now, most of that time on my own. It’s actually possible to get quite involved and do some cool stuff with the changes you make, while keeping up to date; with the resources the size of a company like Brave have, it’d be incredibly straightforward to actually use your own browser logic, with a bit of good engineering. (To all intents and purposes, using Gecko as the engine and your own browser features on top of that, separate to Firefox itself).

I’ve started myself in the past, and am picking that back up again. But by all means it’s quite possible.

Related, the story of William Lyttle[1], the “Mole Man of Hackney”, is rather fascinating. Dug for years underneath his house and surrounding streets in London.

He was then evicted by the local council, the house sold, renovated by an architect and a well known artist moved in[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyttle

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks5QdYhvHWg

I’m aware; I’ve been in the industry a long time.

They won’t be making anywhere near 1/10th of what Firefox makes, even with 1/10th of the user base, because those are highly specialised contracts.

Google typically won’t touch you at all (although the founders connections may help them here, but I could see that upsetting some of Google’s business partners). Almost every Google search partnership is a legacy one.

With Bing, you’re looking at a standard revenue share, of which they take a cut, and you’re at the whim of seasonality, not a fixed sum as say Firefox has. Then, the investors won’t just want their investment back; they’ll want a proper return as well.

Like I’ve said, the monetization opportunities that respect the user are hard.

Avast made a killing with their browser, and they did that by selling user data.

The fact that they’re a closed source browser does not lend them any favours.

If I'm not mistaken Arc is also a closed source browser. The company has raised $18M since 2020. How are they expecting to make that RoI for their investors?

Monetisation for browsers is incredibly hard, and doing it in a way that respects the end user is even harder. Curious to see their play.

He worked in the garment industry, for a company that would manufacture clothes for Inditex etc. The programme has a lot of sections. From what I recall: A records module for all the fabrics used, all the designs the designers would come up with, and all the trimmings. The styles module "compiles" the styles and garments; the orders module keeps track of the amounts of orders placed by the customer and starts the preparing to manufacture process. Then there are quite a few different report modules that deal with things in the manufacturing stages, such as truck loading (say a truck is on the way to Morocco, it has picked up the garments and is on the way back, etc.). Then it also deals with samples the customer requests (as you would get at a fabric or paint shop), and the list goes on! Essentially, it is a digital replacement for all the manual processes the company would have to go through (and as I recall, it was all quite manual!). Something bespoke but where the scope is actually quite huge for one person to do. Even though he’s retired now, he’s still working on it!

My father has been developing a Delphi CRUD application for nearly 25 years now as a hobby. It’s quite fascinating—he never saw any reason to change languages or environments, as they have always done what he needed them to do.

This release is great as he’s just moved over to a HiDPI screen and Delphi 11 automatically deals with the awkward sizing issues that come with that, but he was stuck on Delphi 10.3 manually updating every component (trying to anyway, the documentation is SO poor for it)! I called him when I read this with the good news, and he sounded quite excited by the prospect of not needing to do that anymore!