15 Years of Forking (Waterfox)
54 points by runxiyu
54 points by runxiyu
Lovely post, it's nice people like this exist :)
Since this is about browsers, I hope it is OK to segue a little. One of my frustrations when using current crop of browsers has been that when I reopen one of the older tabs, they immediately try to update from the server, and if I do not have network access, show the network error page. This is very frustrating because I often save up tabs for later reading, which may come weeks later, at places where there is no immediate internet access possible. Do others face this issue? and is there any way to disable this behavior?
I have not seen the ability to disable this in any browser. I think it’s because the favored behavior is to offload tab contents after some time to save on memory use, to support many tabs being “open”. Case in point: this other thread here.
I presume you are talking about how browsers will discard long-disused tabs from memory, and would like some way to force the browser to keep them at least cached? I'm not aware of a way to do that in mainstream browsers, but if it fits your use cases otherwise, offpunk is designed for that kind of offline browsing.
Firefox on Android seems to do this! Even with an internet connection, it will open the past version of a tab and requires a reload to e.g. see new comments. This makes me think it's already possible on the desktop too through some about:config stuff.
I have been a bit frustrated with Vivaldi recently. Maybe I should give Waterfox a try. Does anyone here have experience with using it as a daily driver?
I'm using Waterfox as my main browser under macOS. It has a vertical tab bar with nesting (parent-child) that I quite like, even with 10-20 windows with many tabs open it remains perfectly usable, and I haven't yet had any problems with Firefox extensions. Same for Linux, just with a lot fewer hours of use.
How many tabs per window?
Depends, somewhere around 3 on the lower end, and I usually do not have to scroll the vertical list, so not more than 20-30.
I can share my own experience, but it'll be somewhat skewed since I utilize Auto Tab Discard. I've run 3-4 windows with each window having between 50 and 200 tabs, though over 200 it definitely starts to struggle a bit. The tab management is also nice enough that it replaced Sidebery for me.
Firefox now has a builtin feature to unload tabs, and automatically unload inactive ones. You might be able to get rid of the extension!
So it does! I don't know if that'll replace it for me just yet, as it does have some nice features. Not discarding when there's unsubmitted form changes, the ability to save the YouTube timestamp on a video before discarding it, automatically discarding tabs that aren't preserved by existing rules, and a few other niceties.
From what I see, Firefox's native tab unloading will only not unload a tab if it's playing media, displaying Picture-in-Picture, or using WebRTC, and doesn't seem to have a way to have it automatically discard tabs after some period of time, only in response to low memory. Though that said, it does seem like they can work complementarily, with Firefox's native tab unloading acting more as a last-resort option.
Does anyone here have experience with using it as a daily driver?
Sure. I switched to it when Firefox Quantum came out -- 2017, I think. I had customised Firefox with something like 25 carefully-collected addons, and Quantum stopped XUL addons working. Only 2 or 3 unimportant ones were left.
So I deserted to Waterfox, in which they still worked.
Waterfox is based off Firefox ESR releases. Eventually it rebased to Firefox 57 (IIRC) -- the last version with XUL -- and then Waterfox G2 had to move to the new ESR and XUL was lost. By then I was used to it, so I stayed. I've gradually assembled a set of Webextensions that do about 80% of what I had before.
Around that point, though, I moved my Windows and macOS boxes to upstream Firefox. I still run Waterfox on Linux, because it integrates well with a global menu bar. I use Unity where I can and Xfce where I can't, and it works with both the Unity global menu bar and the Xfce one -- and with MATE and KDE which I don't routinely use.
Saying that, while Firefox occasionally adds handy new features, I am annoyed with the LLM-bot bloat, and I am considering either switching back, or switching to Zen.
Waterfox is just Firefox ESR with the icky bits removed. It syncs to Mozilla Sync. All your addons work. It was immune to the Foxstuck bug because it doesn't do telemetry.
while Firefox occasionally adds handy new features, I am annoyed with the LLM-bot bloat
Have you tried flipping the “Block AI enhancements” switch in the “AI Controls” section of preferences? If you have, have you seen LLM-related features that annoy you since?
(I’m specifically asking about the GUI setting. There has been misspelled about:config editing advice going around that has resulted in people getting angry at Mozilla. Misspelled setting don’t do anything.)
Yes, of course. I have written articles for the Register both on how to disable the LLMs using about:config before the "killswitch" in Firefox 148, and on how to use it after it became available.
I've also seen unconfirmed rumours that there are or were bot-powered functions that the killswitch didn't touch, but I haven't got anything solid enough that I can verify it in order to publish.
But even if it's turned off, it's still there in the code. That's a waste of RAM if nothing else, and a browser is one of the biggest memory-hogs on any system these days.
I feel like they intentionally made that switch overly broad. It kills local machine translation. Nobody has ever branded machine translation as "AI"; yes I know it probably uses a neural network, same as Google Translate has used for decades; that's not "AI" in my book. It's an old feature that has been retroactively branded as "AI" to make share holders happy and has no place being turned off by an AI kill switch.
In any case, the result is that you still have to go through and manually turn off the actual AI features while being careful not to turn off the old non-AI features which have been retroactively rebranded.
“AI” is a fuzzy marketing term, people want to turn off what they think is bad “AI”, and disagree on what it is. So, after flipping the big switch, you need to re-enable the features you like.
If the switch didn’t turn off translation, someone who thinks it counts as “AI” could frame failure to turn it off as Mozilla not understanding consent.
(Elsewhere, there are features that are very much branded “AI” that people may like even if they hate LLM chatbots: AI Denoise in Lightroom Classic, for example.)
I think it's reasonable to not disable things which have been a standard part of computing for decades and have only recently been rebranded "AI" to please investors.
Honestly, a better approach might be to not do the rebrand in the first place.
Used it years ago, worked mostly fine. I don't remember why I stopped and probably bears no resemblance to the current release.
I'm typing this on LibreWolf, but not for religious reasons, just because I needed a separate browser on this machine (not profiles). Not even sure why I chose this over Waterfox.
The last time I used it they were slow to keep up with releases but that was a while ago and know there have been a lot of changes. I generally use Librewolf but did like Waterfox when using it. It felt a little more consumer ready in features.
Used to run Waterfox as my daily driver and still use it as secondary but have switched my primary to Zen browser, where Gecko based innovation is today. Have nothing against Waterfox but Zen has a ton more cool features.
Does anyone here have experience with using it as a daily driver?
Not a full daily driver but I do my laptop YouTube viewing through it (to preserve my Safari cookies for yt-dlp) and it's been solid on that aspect (even silently skipping sponsor segments which took me a while to notice.)
(In retrospect, it probably makes more sense to keep YouTube viewing in Safari with the rest of my browsing and use the Waterfox cookies for yt-dlp. C'est la vie! Another thing for the project list.)
I've used it since Mozilla said their plan was to turn Firefox into an AI browser. (Sure, Waterfox is still reliant on Mozilla but at least I'm somewhat distanced from the worst of Mozilla's decisions now, I don't trust Mozilla with direct access to directly auto update my browser anymore)
It has worked really well to be honest. No issues. It's just a slightly better Firefox. The most notable change is the lack of various Mozilla bullshit such as the built-in ads and the AI stuff. And it supports JPEG-XL out of the box which is nice (not that noticeable day to day but it does let me read blog posts which compare image formats with all demo images loading).
I've been daily driving it for about a year. Zero complaints: from a user's perspective, it's just like Firefox, except with all of the anti-features removed or disabled. It seems to be compatible with Firefox's profile data format too, so just renaming your ~/.firefox/ dir to ~/.waterfox/ should just work.
I was about to move to Firefox (or Glide), mostly because Waterfox is a little behind Firefox on releases. 100% understandable, must be a huge amount of work.
But I am intrigued by the integration of Brave’s adblocker (in-process, Rust).
I think will put it off until I can try the new adblocker.