Waterfox

78.5.0

78.5.0

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Well I have been using this for a few days and must confess I really like it. I can log onto a web address that until now kept saying Blocked Addware. Even though I hadn't.

After a few years using Waterfox instead of Firefox Quantum, it became harder and harder to tell the difference and why, in the end, I was using it... The dev used to put an emphasis on privacy but since he recently partnered with a firm that arose some doubt about data collection (System1), he wrote in a forum that we users had misunderstood and Waterfox never claimed to be a privacy focused browser... :-o I've not been convinced by his answers to the doubts expressed by the other users, and while I've been a happy user for years I finally switched back to Firefox a few months ago. I'm not saying that Waterfox is worse than other browsers, privacy wise, but I'm simply not convinced that it's better than Firefox for that matter — provided you use all the necessary addons and set the right settings in about:config. Moreover, I was using Waterfox Classic to be as close as possible to pre-Quantum Firefox, so when I read that it should now be considered "best effort", that achieved to decide me. I keep it at hand, just in case... ;-)

It makes a loads of uncontrollable Connections, even when opening with a blank page. For that we already have Chrome.

Well I have been using this for a few days and must confess I really like it. I can log onto a web address that until now kept saying Blocked Addware. Even though I hadn't.

This version has been out for 20 days or so, so this isn't just a first impression. The new icon really looks like a blue fox urinating. I understand that Alex really needs to change the icon, so maybe he can have a "Make My Icon" contest or something. Speaking of which, boy does this thing piss away memory. It launches using a not great but acceptable half gig, but after a day of average usage, it's usually sucking up triple that amount. And, say I wanted to have a baseball game running in the background while I did something more productive. I'm just kidding. That wouldn't be possible with Waterfox. If I tried to switch to another app I'd be looking at a beachball for ten minutes, I can't even imagine what it would be like to try to work while it was playing video.. So unfortunately, Waterfox seems to be outgrowing me at a pretty rapid pace, and I'm constantly forced to use my backup of Opera even though I hate the layout, and I know it's probably logging every move I make, I just need that 1.5 gb of memory for other things.

After Mozilla's grotesque blunder with addons expired certificates, Waterfox confirmed its benefits as a solid and reliable browser. As for the future, news are pretty good: the next big version should continue putting together what is/was good in Firefox, some old extensions are even being updated, as mentioned in the release notes: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-56.2.10-release-download/ I salute Mr Alex's dedication to his project and feel more confident than ever about this great successor to Firefox! :-)

Really enjoying Waterfox so far after using it a couple days. I'm not heavy on the add-ons, just a few. But I'm always looking for something decent based on FireFox or WebKit.

WTF 56.2.4 is out. Time for a small review. :-) Now that FF Quantum has gone away from me and my use case, I'm still using the last version of Chromium running on OS 10.9 as my main browser, but this will probably change as it's not being updated anymore for that system. Now, I coud call WTF "the old faithful" as it is slowly evolving, integrating security patches from FF, but keeping what I liked in old FF. No doubt it will take the place of Chromium for me, sooner or later. In the meantime, it's my safe choice when Chromium is not satisfactory or buggy on some site.