I’m aware that it used to be owned by an ad company System1. But I found this post by the founder where he said that it’s now an independent project.
+1 for Waterfox
I switched to it after the Firefox debacle. Brave is my main browser and I used Firefox as an alt, but now it’s just Brave and Waterfox.
It’s not as heavy on the privacy protections as LibreWolf but it’s nowhere near the level of site breakage that I got with LibreWolf. Plus, unlike LibreWolf whose chief maintainer is heavily political and includes those politics in what changes are pushed (another major reason I abandoned Firefox), I have yet to see any blatant political statements or actions with Waterfox.
Considering the fact that I never used Firefox for privacy so much as having an alt to keep big tech sites separate from my main traffic, it works just fine.
Presumably, there would be no dirt, since water cleans dirt off of foxes.
just ignore it.
use librewolf, mullvad, or tor browser.
dirt on water? mud?
MudFox?
I’m wondering if I should use it as well. I know LibreWolf isn’t for me
I am curious why Librewolf isn’t for you?
Overall I’ve had no issue with librewolf. It’s runs just like Firefox without some of the bloat. The very few sites I’ve found don’t work, don’t work on FF either (usually payment/online stores with popups and shit). Download whatever extension, change the settings and even sign into Firefox cloud. Yes, you’ll make your “fingerprint” more unique but, the other security improvemts/defaults make it a worthy trade off.
Biggest annoyance is by default cookies/logged in sites are wiped on close. That can easily be changed globally, or white list what you want to save site settings for. Signing out of websites is a good habit anyway, especially ones with payment attached.
The neat part is there’s a lot options to pick from, some of them are doing cool things like the one outta Japan Floorp looks interesting.
I want to keep cookies to log in easily or to keep some preferences in specific websites
I want to keep the history for autofill urls and stuff
I don’t want to keep light theme by default, as well as fixed browser size, and I have to entirely remove fingerprinting protection for that
At this point I’m just using LibreWolf with settings a lot of people don’t use. Might as well use Firefox with custom about:config entries…
Its default settings are not good for everyday people, and even for privacy enthusiasts. They’re for paranoid people, at the cost of making the browser much less enjoyable
I’ve heard good things about Zen Browser if you want to give that a try.
I’m still a bit scared of it being in beta. Security issues are the kind of things you really don’t want in a browser
Can’t answer for them but for me, sites would break, the cookie management was a pain in the backside, and I hated having it start in windowed literally every time I’d start the browser. It also doesn’t handle containers as well as the original FF addon did.
Forgot about the window size thing, I looked up the setting to make it open normally.
I know I’m defeating the purpose by undoing someone the settings, but I’d rather the defaults be set for privacy and I disable the few that are overbearing/hindering my use. Never did use containers, so I didn’t know it was bad.
I use it for everyday things like schoolwork and gmail and it works great so far. I still have Librewolf on the side but it seems like it’s for more privacy and that you’re not supposed to change it too much for example adding more extensions or it defeats the purpose of it.
Yea, it feels like the tor browser of clear web
That’s pretty much it afaik. Owner sold it, new owner didn’t know what to do with it, owner bought it back.
Yeah Tuff, give me some fresh dirt.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure System1 divested themselves of it.
They still own Startpage and Startmail, though.
phew and thats how i accidentally discovered just now about Startpage being owned by a marketing company, somehow i missed that news
From Wikipedia
In October 2019, Startpage received a significant investment from Privacy One Group, a subsidiary of System1.
i guess now i will have to pivot search to somewhere else, i went from DuckDuckGo to Startpage years ago now i will look around for something else
I switched to Brave Search when I switched to Brave, very pleased with it so far. Its image search isn’t quite as good but otherwise, I haven’t looked back.
I use SearXNG. I would highly recommend.
thanks, i heard and tried it already many times but:
- I need to self-host (fine for doing it locally but im wary of opening it to access outside the network and be open to external threats since i wouldnt know how to properly handle that so i went for trying to selfhost 4get for being more lightweight)
- find a trustworthy instance (don’t know how, i dont mind much on what instance i choose for YouTube frontend proxies but for searches i want to be more careful, maybe if there was a search extension to randomize instance between EU-based instances i’d feel more comfortable since its what made me pivot to Startpage years ago as it was purely a EU-based company)
TROM Search via
https://search.trom.tf/?q=%25swill cycle through instances. Sometimes the results suck but you can simply rerun your query. This is what I currently use for everything by default.
Wasn’t the whole reason to use Waterfox because Firefox didn’t support 64x at the time? It supports it now, so why would you still use Waterfox?
It got a big boost when Mozilla updated their ToS a couple months ago to say they could use your browser data to train their AI.
Well, it’s not that they said they would, it’s that they updated their terms so that they could if they wanted to. For some (myself included) that was enough.
Waterfox try to remove some blobs of Firefox out of the box, so it’s better for the normal user
Waterfox try to remove some blobs of Firefox out of the box, so it’s better for the normal user
How is removing blobs better for the normal user?
Because it makes a healthier base to work with or to simply use it without caring
Increasing privacy (and sometimes security)
I have found that Waterfox is slightly, slightly faster on both Windows and Android and am loving it so far.
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