21 ms·

Waterfox Browser

134 points by isaac21259 5y ago

overeater 5y ago
Several things make me skeptical about this browser. 1) Homepage is a bit uncared for. The Copyright shows "2020" at the bottom, the top screenshot looks doctored rather than being a real screenshot. 2) It's owned by an ad marketing platform, System1, as noted in the FAQ. On the plus side, the Github repository is active.
- Josh5 5y ago
  What's wrong with 2020? Generally the year displayed with a copyright is the year the work was first published. For a website, 2020 is a pretty recent initial publish. People don't just fully rewrite their website every year.
  - phinnaeus 5y ago
    I would think it's whenever the page content was last updated, rather than first published. I also think it's silly to put on your website, but I am not a lawyer and don't know if it has any actual purpose.
    - atoav 5y ago
      Why would you change the copyright forward. A copyright 1994 means "This content exists since 1994, if you copied after that, there is proof I have made this before you"
      - garmaine 5y ago
        That's not what copyright is for or how copyright works. Copyright renewal is a real thing. Copyright years generally get refreshed whenever the content changes.
        rzzzt 5y ago
        A from-to year format solves both problems.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        > Copyright renewal is a real thing. Not in most jurisdictions, no. What's your country where copyright renewal is still a thing? (no judgement here, despite all my hatred for copyright i'd rather have copyright renewal than copyright until 50y after death of all editors/compositors/authors as we have in Europe)
        garmaine 5y ago
        Pretty much all jurisdictions. Even in Europe the copyright is extended if you alter a work.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        The original copyright is not extended, no, unless i have some serious legal misunderstandings. For example, translations for a book will have a newer copyright, but the original text's copyright will not be extended by receiving a new translation.
        bscphil 5y ago
        It would be slightly more accurate to say that you receive a new copyright in any new material in the work, not that your copyright is extended on the old material. Under U.S. law at least, a significant alteration of a work results in a derivative work under law, and you are correct to say that it is entirely reasonable to place an updated copyright date on that work.
        bscphil 5y ago
        The United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_Unite... Moreover, under United States law, new editions of a preexisting work are considered "derivative works" and in these cases "the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work." [1] SIGNIFICANTLY, this U.S. government source explicitly mentions the following as cases of derivative works which allow for a new copyright: * A new version of an existing computer program * A revision of a website The new copyright on the derivative work "covers only the additions, changes, or other new material appearing for the first time in the work." In other words, by creating a derivative work via updating an existing computer program or modifying a website, you absolutely gain a new copyright on any new material and you absolutely can and should update the copyright date under U.S. law. People urging the contrary, at least insofar as they are talking about the United States or governments with similar copyright regimes are dead wrong, and jcranmer and garmaine are right and unfairly downvoted. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
      - jcranmer 5y ago
        That's not what ©1994 means. What it actually does is it establishes first publication date. In US copyright law, there are three dates that control copyright: 120 years from creation (first fixation), 95 years from first publication, or life + 70 years. If any one of those terms expire [1], the work moves into the public domain. Affixing an earlier copyright date affords no advantages. Pre-1976 copyright reform, flubbing the formalities means you lose copyright entirely. After that reform, you still keep copyright, but instead you lose out on some ability to recuperate losses, and you give your opponent extra legal ammunition in any copyright infringement cases. [1] Strictly speaking, life + 70 years actually rules when the author is determined. If you read the law carefully, once the fixation/publication threshold is crossed, it is now the burden of proof of the copyright owner to demonstrate that life + 70 hasn't happened yet, and furthermore to demonstrate that the alleged infringer failed to do due diligence to determine the death date of the author. In practice, it could end up really being a lesser-of-all-three situation, but we aren't going to get any case law on this until 2074 at the earliest, since life + 70 doesn't start until 1978.
- progval 5y ago
  > the top screenshot looks doctored rather than being a real screenshot It's SVG, so not a screenshot at all.
- jikbd 5y ago
  The first screenshot is in fact not a screenshot but an svg file. I don’t see how that makes the website look more fishy, though…
  - overeater 5y ago
    There's awkward spacing in the characters in the address bar. They're uneven.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bArray 5y ago
  The reviews are pretty great. Definitely legit. > “It’s incredibly difficult for new browsers to penetrate the market, but there’s one such browser called Waterfox, which is attempting to gain a foothold into the market by claiming to be the fastest browser in existence by leveraging on the 64-bit architecture of the latest operating systems.” - Can A New Web Browser Break Into the Market? / London Datastore Woah, they must be leveraging that new 64 bit technology everybody has been talking about! > “In a week where we celebrate the best of the British technology industry, we speak to young developer Alex Kontos about building a successful web browser, a search engine that gives money to charity, Microsoft Edge and more.” - From bedroom coder to building a Google search engine rival / Trusted Reviews Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge!
  - jefftk 5y ago
    > they must be leveraging that new 64 bit technology everybody has been talking about! Waterfox is a project that has been around for long enough (~2011) that 64-bit was actually a thing people cared about. > they even give money to Microsoft Edge! They are saying they covered several topics in the interview, of which one was charity, and another was Microsoft Edge.
  - MrAlex94 5y ago
    They are from the last decade or so - I linked them when I was a young lad and as you can tell the website is quite outdated now (and being updated in the meanwhile - takes time though!). Just thought it was a nice way to get people familiar with Waterfox since - at least at the time (years ago now) I wasn't too sure how to introduce people to it. > Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge! I never did, that's just the structure of the sentence mentioning that they also talk about Edge in the article.
rogual 5y ago
"No telemetry / We don't need to know what you do within your browser." OK, good. "Limited Data Collection / We try and take the bare minimum amount of information to keep things running smoothly. " Wait, what? So which is it?
- csande17 5y ago
  If I were to take a guess (just reading charitably, I haven't actually used Waterfox): they're probably trying to say that the browser doesn't make any requests whose sole purpose is to report your information to them. No telemetry. But browsers do have to send some network requests to their developers for stuff like automatic updates, and they do have to log some of the information received—for example, to tell if someone is trying to hack the update server—but they'll try and keep that to a minimum.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  My guess would be automated crash reports. Those are too good to ignore, and usually don't include much PII. But its a guess. Would be nice to have devs pitch in here.
- mobilemidget 5y ago
  My little snitch popped up like 20 times for callbacks to mozilla and other hosts..
  - nbzso 5y ago
    I am thankful for Little Snitch and Open Snitch existence. If those tools didn't exist I will not connect to Interned at all. Started fighting macOS telemetry and refused transition to Linux partially because of absence of LS alternative. Since Open Snitch I happily run my personal computer with PureOS. https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch The amount of system mothership calling on any platform is mind boggling. And everything has "rational" and "it is inevitable" attached to it. My Firefox looks like Christmas Tree from extensions and my about:config is taking too long to set properly. What a beautiful future we are creating. :)
lproven 5y ago
I have been using Waterfox Classic as my default browser on half a dozen boxes since 2017, on Ubuntu, openSUSE, Windows 10 and macOS. AMA. :-) I customised Firefox fairly heavily, with an assortment of over a dozen addons I'd just accumulated over the years. Firefox Quantum broke all but 2 of them and destroyed the program's usefulness to me. Waterfox imported my profile intact and allows me to keep my customisations. I have a vertical tab bar on the left (flat _not_ hierarchical) which is also merged with the bookmarks toolbar, also flattened. I have two download managers, one for ordinary small downloads in a tab, and another that can resume downloads, segment and parallelise large downloads, detect and bypass redirect pages and so on. Another addon automatically detects [Next] links and preloads the content into the first page, so you a big single page instead of multiple sub-pages. Another supplies anonymous login details from a shared public database. Another sorts and dedupes my several thousand bookmarks. Oh, and on Ubuntu with Unity, Waterfox's menu bar automatically appears in my top panel. Firefox for some baffling reason hides its menu bar, but if enabled, it doesn't go into the top panel and instead wastes a strip of my laptop's fairly small screen. And so on and so on. Firefox Quantum destroyed all this and delivers an IMHO fairly poor user experience which is as bad as Chrome's and in no way preferable to Chrome. I have found some workarounds, for instance a vertical tab bar, but I have to enable a setting that enables user customisation, then I have to add a subdirectory to my profile and put some CSS in it in order to hide the crappy horizontal tabs and the pointless header row in the sidebar. It's a pain. WebExtensions are sad crippled little things compared to the power of XUL and they don't allow you to to really change the UI of the browser. My impression is that today's Firefox developers don't really know or understand what people did with the tools that turn-of-the-century Mozilla provided us with. Since they didn't have a clue what was possible, they decided to rip the whole lot out and fob us off with pathetic Chrome-style extensions, Chrome-style tabs, and Chrome-style lack of customisability. So I switched to a power user's browser that still lets me do this stuff. There is no cost to me and contrary to what other commenters claim I can see no performance difference whatsoever. I have kept Firefox around on my Linux boxes because Github bitches about Waterfox, and apart from being much more clunky, Firefox 93 gives me nothing at all. No better speed, no better stability, about 1% of the selection of addons and they're crippled things. TBH I thought this would be a temporary thing, but it's been four years now and Waterfox Classic is still going strong. Mozilla, OTOH, has totally lost its way and seems to be flailing.
Causality1 5y ago
Has Waterfox gotten its act together? Last I checked on it it had a reputation of being slow and unstable,and its users were mostly people who needed XUL support. Of course those same people said it didn't have much life left in it but it's obviously still here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- flowerbreeze 5y ago
  I tried it out, and it's very fast on some websites, but freezes the tab for a few seconds when trying to display others. A bit later (in 15 minutes or so) it completely froze the system toward the end of watching a video leaving the audio buffer to repeat. This is the first time my current Linux laptop has crashed since I got it over half a year ago, so I think it's not a great result for the browser.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    > I tried it out, and it's very fast on some websites, but freezes the tab for a few seconds when trying to display others. A bit later (in 15 minutes or so) it completely froze the system toward the end of watching a video leaving the audio buffer to repeat. This is the first time my current Linux laptop has crashed since I got it over half a year ago, so I think it's not a great result for the browser. This is very similar to the behavior I saw "random freezes during page load/render" on a different OS. Overall, it was very fast on my system, except for this specific slowdown activity.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  > Last I checked on it it had a reputation of being slow and unstable,and its users were mostly people who needed XUL support. In my testing with it, I found it to be very fast, and a little unstable but the XUL support was a big plus.
melenaos 5y ago
By reading the subtitle 'a perfect ballance between privacy and usability' i think that it wont have privacy and might be less user friendly that other browsers. Also, the statement that you try to collect less data doesn't says anything about privacy.
- aurora72 5y ago
  I've used a recent version of WF yesteryear on Mac and Windows, both with the firewall installed and guess what. The Firewall started notifying numerous outgoing connection attempts even before I opened any webpage! WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers. But that's not the end of the story. I've installed the classic version of WF so that it would run on my older Mac. What could be worse than an unashamed privacy infringement? WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD. Luckily for me the SSD survived the hard off but one thing is proven for sure: WF is to be avoided at all costs.
  - MrAlex94 5y ago
    Unfortunately with the way Gecko is structured, the browser requires a lot of connections to the Firefox Remote Settings Server, for: * OpenH264 Codec for H264 playback * Widevine (if you enable DRM, it's disabled by default on Waterfox) * Extension blocklists * Phishing/malware website blocklists * Certificate downloads and HSTS Preload Lists * Captive portal detection * And a few other security related bits and bobs I can't remember off the top of my head. I did try to migrate to offline dumps so these things would only get updated at browser update time, but it causes a few issues with the browser doing so. > WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers. That would be rather shocking to me if it's true - the browser should be making requests to download things, but not upload anything? If this isn't the case do let me know what is going where as that is most definitely not by design! > WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD. That is definitely not ideal, but unfortunately Classic is very long in the tooth now and compatibility is getting harder with each release. Sorry you had those issues though, definitely not what we want happening.
mastrsushi 5y ago
Ambitious, but absolutely not "the fastest browser in existence"
- guilhas 5y ago
  Strangely the fastest Firefox based, until recently at least, the latest Firefox release also seems quite an improvement
nextaccountic 5y ago
Is this related to Firefox? The name suggests it, but the page doesn't say
- Jowsey 5y ago
  Its big thing originally was being a 64-bit port of Firefox. I assume it's still based on Firefox in some way, based on the name, but not really sure what it brings to the table anymore, besides some minor stuff you can already get with extensions.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Its thing nowadays is being a fork of a Firefox release old enough to still support XUL. Which means it's effectively a 4+ year old version of Firefox, with no renderer isolation and no support for most web features added in the last four years.
    - solarkraft 5y ago
      > effectively a 4+ year old version of Firefox, with no renderer isolation and no support for most web features added in the last four years Okay, hilarious. “Impressive that they’re keeping it up to date while maintaining XUL support”, I thought. Never mind.
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    > besides some minor stuff you can already get with extensions Waterfox supports extensions that are no longer supported by Firefox.
iota8 5y ago
Not much information on the home page on why to use this and not Firefox. As this is derivative of Firefox, then what does it add over Firefox?
- metagame 5y ago
  It doesn't ship ads in your web browser, unlike Firefox. It allows you to install WebExtensions from any source (even if you don't sign them with Mozilla!), unlike Firefox. I wouldn't recommend it, but that's just because I wouldn't recommend any web browser right now.
  - Nicksil 5y ago
    >It doesn't ship ads in your web browser Well, Waterfox is owned by an advertising company.
    - metagame 5y ago
      Sure, and I'm not saying it's good for privacy. But Firefox in its default setting is also bordering unusable, inserting ads in the address bar! It's incredible that an advertising company does better than a for-profit owned by a non-profit in this regard.
      - bscphil 5y ago
        Sorry, context for this? I take a pretty thorough scalpel to removing any traces of sponsored content from Firefox, and it never occurred to me that they might have ads in the address bar. Is there a previous discussion an announcement about this?
        metagame 5y ago
        They added it unannounced in the last update, Firefox 93. There was a small outrage on behalf of the dozens of people still paying attention to Firefox, but nothing came of it. If you're on a good distribution, you'll probably see it disabled by default.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pndy 5y ago
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554083 And the one on acquisition by System1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 It's my choice for "sandbox" browser - as in doing all stuff that I wouldn't want to do on Vivaldi.
- Sillzen 5y ago
  What do you mean by "stuff that I wouldn't want to do on Vivaldi"?
  - sul_tasto 5y ago
    Vivaldi is also a web browser: https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/
    - Sillzen 5y ago
      Indeed, but I am unsure what OP would want to avoid doing on Vivaldi but would be happy to do on Waterfox.
      - aasasd 5y ago
        Dirty stuff probably. Wouldn't want to taint the primary workhorse by association with ogling naked people and buying weed.
  - pndy 5y ago
    Vivaldi is set to be very strict when it comes to ads and tracking, and that affects sometimes how sites works. I've set Waterfox to be more "liberal"; it's for dirty-dirty stuff and dirty stuff. I'm also using it as a kind of sentiment I feel to Gecko engine. I'm not using Firefox since v60 - one of updates damaged my profile in an unrecoverable way.
iszomer 5y ago
There's also LibreWolf.
- rapnie 5y ago
  Thanks. Didn't know about this one. The site is here: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
  - throwaway134183 5y ago
    Years ago together with another guy I created LibreFox. I came up withe the original concept that is still used (No telemetry, private search, uBlock Origin by default, default security and privacy settings). We quickly heard from Mozilla's lawyers: "Eliminate the Fox from your name or we sue you!". So we abandoned the project, but seeing the website you posted, my concept has lived on, and the gitlab seems to be pretty active as well!
  - aloisdg 5y ago
    I still think that WindWolf or WaterWolf would have been better. Like it though :)
- solarkraft 5y ago
  LibreWolf may be a great and private browser for simple websites, but it’s definitely not your gateway to modern web applications. It locks down so much through a configuration override that a good chunk of modern web functionality just won’t work (WebRTC, for example). I gave up after about 5 times of looking up a problem and changing the configuration file without an end in sight. They go a bit far for my taste.
- c80e74f077 5y ago
  This. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I use Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, along five other browsers, on a 2008 iMac. Waterfox is stable and workable for me. I use Vimium-FF for keyboard things. My use case: I only visit a few sites, including this one, and rarely click the article links here. I really like it, it is like a Firefox which has been through obedience school, and now knows how to behave itself. Definitely in my top-10 favorite post-2015 browsers.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  > I use Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, along five other browsers Interesting - would you mind sharing what you use the others for?
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    The thing I do by far the most is testing my own websites. I love the Web and I believe strongly in Any Browser, so I regularly test in a whole variety of browsers to ensure compatibility. I try to dogfood this as much as possible. For example, I'm posting this with Firefox 3.6.
schipplock 5y ago
Will there be an AArch64 build for macOS?
solarkraft 5y ago
As pointed out in another comment [0], apparently it’s extremely outdated. Other comments describe it as unstable and lacking Apple Silicon builds. If you’re just looking for a version of Firefox without the user-hostile parts, this ain’t exactly it. From my months-old research such a thing doesn’t really seem to exist yet, but I definitely think it should. It could perhaps initially be shipped as a set of patches to be done on top of an existing Firefox installation. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816443
- bscphil 5y ago
  > If you’re just looking for a version of Firefox without the user-hostile parts LibreWolf seems like an attempt at this: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    I don’t think it is. If it is, it’s pretty bad at it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816990
    - bscphil 5y ago
      Hmm. You're right that they are trying to do more than just that, they're trying to make a browser with an "off by default" policy for anything potentially privacy impacting. Personally, I haven't done any more than check it out, but I did end up switching back most of their changed settings. I think the end game for this probably ought to be an interface that appears post-install and asks you to choose a set of privacy-friendly options (which may break things), or enable all web technologies (which may impact privacy). That seems the user-respecting thing to do to me. Still, though, I'm glad that privacy-by-default, no unexpected connections out of the box, is something that someone is working on.
- MrAlex94 5y ago
  This doesn’t paint a clear picture. There are two versions of Waterfox: Classic, based on Gecko 56 that has backported security patches (but is not recommended to be used unless you are desperate to use XUL extensions) and the 3rd Generation (G3) based on ESR releases. Waterfox Classic is based on XUL and while we back port security patches as best we can, I always try motivate existing users to migrate to the newer versions. I’m not going to force an upgrade on Classic users as it will break their current setup and instead leave it their choice. We follow the ESR release currently for “current” versions (the default download on the website) and since ESR78 didn’t support ARM on macOS there were no builds for it. Now that we have the beta out for the ESR91 version, ARM support for macOS is available: https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G4.0.0b2 https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G4.0.0b2 I’d like to think that Waterfox G3+ does fit in your criteria.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
The problem is, it's very old, and with Firefox, the good stuff comes with the last versions. Especially, modern Firefox is wicked fast, while just a few versions before, it was less so. The difference is _staggering_. I think there is a space for add ons to setup Firefox to be more privacy focused. It's easier to maintain than a fork: compiling on so many targets such a huge software is very hard.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  On my phone, I have the newest version of Firefox Fennec and IceCatMobile (ancient and barely supported) - they both launch and function at, as far as I can see, exactly the same speed. Where is this speedup you mention actually found?
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    While I do use Firefox on mobile, I'm talking about the desktop version, like most people do. The latest rendering improvements are showing great results, and hardware acceleration on Linux is now on part with Windows, so it's fantastic to use on a modern laptop.
    - kiwijamo 5y ago
      Does Firefox do hardware acceleration for videos yet? It still does it in software by default on Linux as far as I know, unless this has changed recently?
      - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
        Don't know, videos are seemless but I got a very powerful CPU.
jccalhoun 5y ago
I keep it installed because the old pre-webextension version of downthemall can download some things the new version doesn't. But I only use it like once a month or so. I don't see any reason for me to use it on a regular basis.
- MrAlex94 5y ago
  If you're interested, DownThemAll has been ported to support newer Gecko versions: https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master/extensions/DownThemAll https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master... Waterfox G3+ supports installing bootstrapped/XPCOM extensions :-)
Svperstar 5y ago
I stopped using Waterfox back in like 2010-2012(not sure the exact year) and switched to Cyberfox. Then to Chrome, back to Firefox. I don't see any point in using Waterfox in 2021.
warent 5y ago
Curious to know why is it so complicated to build a web browser? Yes, they're probably the most complex piece of software humans have ever created. That being said, it seems like it would be possible to create a browser that handles all of the most common use cases, so ~90% of your browsing experience. Sure, maybe you need years and dozens of engineers for the final 10% but who cares about that bit? Wouldn't people be willing to accept this feature tradeoff for a new, user-friendly browser?
- johnday 5y ago
  The problem is that due to complexity accrued over time, the 10% of features you speak about are likely going to be core to the operation of the web's most popular sites (FAANMG). And not supporting those sites means not supporting a huge swath of the population who consider those sites critical.
- zie 5y ago
  Think re-writing 100% compatibility with MS windows and how much a of pain in the butt that would be. Wine has been at it for 28 years and they still haven't really managed. A web browser these days is arguably of similar complexity.
- ivoras 5y ago
  Which complex parts would you omit? If you omit video playing, you've prevented people from using YouTube and Netflix. If you omit compositing graphics on top of this video, you've again prevented YouTube and Netflix from showing UI. If you omit canvas and SVG, fancy modern parallax scrolling sites will not load. If you omit WebGL, another half of modern sites which just use it for a rotating logo won't load. Etc, etc... you really can't release a non-100% feature-full browser these days.
- dvogel 5y ago
  That would have been more possible a decade ago when the web browsers were less compatible and sites relied on the lowest common denominator feature set. With the increase in compatibility sites now rely on libraries that each depend on a different 90% of the feature set. Breaking interactions between those dependencies has a cascade effect that leads to really, really, really frustrating experiences today. e.g. a UI that looks perfect and has interaction effects working but a background interaction fails silently. A decade ago compatibility issues were more common but IME they were less frustrating because there was usually a rendering artifact or foreground error that made it clear the author just didn't support your browser.
sandGorgon 5y ago
this is so cool! no mobile ? any learnings here as you attempt to build browsers for the app stores.

134 points by isaac21259 5y ago

Several things make me skeptical about this browser. 1) Homepage is a bit uncared for. The Copyright shows "2020" at the bottom, the top screenshot looks doctored rather than being a real screenshot. 2) It's owned by an ad marketing platform, System1, as noted in the FAQ. On the plus side, the Github repository is active.

Josh5 5y ago
What's wrong with 2020? Generally the year displayed with a copyright is the year the work was first published. For a website, 2020 is a pretty recent initial publish. People don't just fully rewrite their website every year.
- phinnaeus 5y ago
  I would think it's whenever the page content was last updated, rather than first published. I also think it's silly to put on your website, but I am not a lawyer and don't know if it has any actual purpose.
  - atoav 5y ago
    Why would you change the copyright forward. A copyright 1994 means "This content exists since 1994, if you copied after that, there is proof I have made this before you"
    - garmaine 5y ago
      That's not what copyright is for or how copyright works. Copyright renewal is a real thing. Copyright years generally get refreshed whenever the content changes.
      - rzzzt 5y ago
        A from-to year format solves both problems.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > Copyright renewal is a real thing. Not in most jurisdictions, no. What's your country where copyright renewal is still a thing? (no judgement here, despite all my hatred for copyright i'd rather have copyright renewal than copyright until 50y after death of all editors/compositors/authors as we have in Europe)
        garmaine 5y ago
        Pretty much all jurisdictions. Even in Europe the copyright is extended if you alter a work.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        The original copyright is not extended, no, unless i have some serious legal misunderstandings. For example, translations for a book will have a newer copyright, but the original text's copyright will not be extended by receiving a new translation.
        bscphil 5y ago
        It would be slightly more accurate to say that you receive a new copyright in any new material in the work, not that your copyright is extended on the old material. Under U.S. law at least, a significant alteration of a work results in a derivative work under law, and you are correct to say that it is entirely reasonable to place an updated copyright date on that work.
        bscphil 5y ago
        The United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_Unite... Moreover, under United States law, new editions of a preexisting work are considered "derivative works" and in these cases "the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work." [1] SIGNIFICANTLY, this U.S. government source explicitly mentions the following as cases of derivative works which allow for a new copyright: * A new version of an existing computer program * A revision of a website The new copyright on the derivative work "covers only the additions, changes, or other new material appearing for the first time in the work." In other words, by creating a derivative work via updating an existing computer program or modifying a website, you absolutely gain a new copyright on any new material and you absolutely can and should update the copyright date under U.S. law. People urging the contrary, at least insofar as they are talking about the United States or governments with similar copyright regimes are dead wrong, and jcranmer and garmaine are right and unfairly downvoted. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      That's not what ©1994 means. What it actually does is it establishes first publication date. In US copyright law, there are three dates that control copyright: 120 years from creation (first fixation), 95 years from first publication, or life + 70 years. If any one of those terms expire [1], the work moves into the public domain. Affixing an earlier copyright date affords no advantages. Pre-1976 copyright reform, flubbing the formalities means you lose copyright entirely. After that reform, you still keep copyright, but instead you lose out on some ability to recuperate losses, and you give your opponent extra legal ammunition in any copyright infringement cases. [1] Strictly speaking, life + 70 years actually rules when the author is determined. If you read the law carefully, once the fixation/publication threshold is crossed, it is now the burden of proof of the copyright owner to demonstrate that life + 70 hasn't happened yet, and furthermore to demonstrate that the alleged infringer failed to do due diligence to determine the death date of the author. In practice, it could end up really being a lesser-of-all-three situation, but we aren't going to get any case law on this until 2074 at the earliest, since life + 70 doesn't start until 1978.
progval 5y ago
> the top screenshot looks doctored rather than being a real screenshot It's SVG, so not a screenshot at all.
jikbd 5y ago
The first screenshot is in fact not a screenshot but an svg file. I don’t see how that makes the website look more fishy, though…
- overeater 5y ago
  There's awkward spacing in the characters in the address bar. They're uneven.
deleted 5y ago
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bArray 5y ago
The reviews are pretty great. Definitely legit. > “It’s incredibly difficult for new browsers to penetrate the market, but there’s one such browser called Waterfox, which is attempting to gain a foothold into the market by claiming to be the fastest browser in existence by leveraging on the 64-bit architecture of the latest operating systems.” - Can A New Web Browser Break Into the Market? / London Datastore Woah, they must be leveraging that new 64 bit technology everybody has been talking about! > “In a week where we celebrate the best of the British technology industry, we speak to young developer Alex Kontos about building a successful web browser, a search engine that gives money to charity, Microsoft Edge and more.” - From bedroom coder to building a Google search engine rival / Trusted Reviews Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge!
- jefftk 5y ago
  > they must be leveraging that new 64 bit technology everybody has been talking about! Waterfox is a project that has been around for long enough (~2011) that 64-bit was actually a thing people cared about. > they even give money to Microsoft Edge! They are saying they covered several topics in the interview, of which one was charity, and another was Microsoft Edge.
- MrAlex94 5y ago
  They are from the last decade or so - I linked them when I was a young lad and as you can tell the website is quite outdated now (and being updated in the meanwhile - takes time though!). Just thought it was a nice way to get people familiar with Waterfox since - at least at the time (years ago now) I wasn't too sure how to introduce people to it. > Nice, they even give money to Microsoft Edge! I never did, that's just the structure of the sentence mentioning that they also talk about Edge in the article.

rogual 5y ago

"No telemetry / We don't need to know what you do within your browser." OK, good. "Limited Data Collection / We try and take the bare minimum amount of information to keep things running smoothly. " Wait, what? So which is it?

csande17 5y ago
If I were to take a guess (just reading charitably, I haven't actually used Waterfox): they're probably trying to say that the browser doesn't make any requests whose sole purpose is to report your information to them. No telemetry. But browsers do have to send some network requests to their developers for stuff like automatic updates, and they do have to log some of the information received—for example, to tell if someone is trying to hack the update server—but they'll try and keep that to a minimum.
e3bc54b2 5y ago
My guess would be automated crash reports. Those are too good to ignore, and usually don't include much PII. But its a guess. Would be nice to have devs pitch in here.
mobilemidget 5y ago
My little snitch popped up like 20 times for callbacks to mozilla and other hosts..
- nbzso 5y ago
  I am thankful for Little Snitch and Open Snitch existence. If those tools didn't exist I will not connect to Interned at all. Started fighting macOS telemetry and refused transition to Linux partially because of absence of LS alternative. Since Open Snitch I happily run my personal computer with PureOS. https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch The amount of system mothership calling on any platform is mind boggling. And everything has "rational" and "it is inevitable" attached to it. My Firefox looks like Christmas Tree from extensions and my about:config is taking too long to set properly. What a beautiful future we are creating. :)

lproven 5y ago

I have been using Waterfox Classic as my default browser on half a dozen boxes since 2017, on Ubuntu, openSUSE, Windows 10 and macOS. AMA. :-) I customised Firefox fairly heavily, with an assortment of over a dozen addons I'd just accumulated over the years. Firefox Quantum broke all but 2 of them and destroyed the program's usefulness to me. Waterfox imported my profile intact and allows me to keep my customisations. I have a vertical tab bar on the left (flat _not_ hierarchical) which is also merged with the bookmarks toolbar, also flattened. I have two download managers, one for ordinary small downloads in a tab, and another that can resume downloads, segment and parallelise large downloads, detect and bypass redirect pages and so on. Another addon automatically detects [Next] links and preloads the content into the first page, so you a big single page instead of multiple sub-pages. Another supplies anonymous login details from a shared public database. Another sorts and dedupes my several thousand bookmarks. Oh, and on Ubuntu with Unity, Waterfox's menu bar automatically appears in my top panel. Firefox for some baffling reason hides its menu bar, but if enabled, it doesn't go into the top panel and instead wastes a strip of my laptop's fairly small screen. And so on and so on. Firefox Quantum destroyed all this and delivers an IMHO fairly poor user experience which is as bad as Chrome's and in no way preferable to Chrome. I have found some workarounds, for instance a vertical tab bar, but I have to enable a setting that enables user customisation, then I have to add a subdirectory to my profile and put some CSS in it in order to hide the crappy horizontal tabs and the pointless header row in the sidebar. It's a pain. WebExtensions are sad crippled little things compared to the power of XUL and they don't allow you to to really change the UI of the browser. My impression is that today's Firefox developers don't really know or understand what people did with the tools that turn-of-the-century Mozilla provided us with. Since they didn't have a clue what was possible, they decided to rip the whole lot out and fob us off with pathetic Chrome-style extensions, Chrome-style tabs, and Chrome-style lack of customisability. So I switched to a power user's browser that still lets me do this stuff. There is no cost to me and contrary to what other commenters claim I can see no performance difference whatsoever. I have kept Firefox around on my Linux boxes because Github bitches about Waterfox, and apart from being much more clunky, Firefox 93 gives me nothing at all. No better speed, no better stability, about 1% of the selection of addons and they're crippled things. TBH I thought this would be a temporary thing, but it's been four years now and Waterfox Classic is still going strong. Mozilla, OTOH, has totally lost its way and seems to be flailing.

Causality1 5y ago

Has Waterfox gotten its act together? Last I checked on it it had a reputation of being slow and unstable,and its users were mostly people who needed XUL support. Of course those same people said it didn't have much life left in it but it's obviously still here.

deleted 5y ago
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flowerbreeze 5y ago
I tried it out, and it's very fast on some websites, but freezes the tab for a few seconds when trying to display others. A bit later (in 15 minutes or so) it completely froze the system toward the end of watching a video leaving the audio buffer to repeat. This is the first time my current Linux laptop has crashed since I got it over half a year ago, so I think it's not a great result for the browser.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  > I tried it out, and it's very fast on some websites, but freezes the tab for a few seconds when trying to display others. A bit later (in 15 minutes or so) it completely froze the system toward the end of watching a video leaving the audio buffer to repeat. This is the first time my current Linux laptop has crashed since I got it over half a year ago, so I think it's not a great result for the browser. This is very similar to the behavior I saw "random freezes during page load/render" on a different OS. Overall, it was very fast on my system, except for this specific slowdown activity.
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
> Last I checked on it it had a reputation of being slow and unstable,and its users were mostly people who needed XUL support. In my testing with it, I found it to be very fast, and a little unstable but the XUL support was a big plus.

melenaos 5y ago

By reading the subtitle 'a perfect ballance between privacy and usability' i think that it wont have privacy and might be less user friendly that other browsers. Also, the statement that you try to collect less data doesn't says anything about privacy.

aurora72 5y ago
I've used a recent version of WF yesteryear on Mac and Windows, both with the firewall installed and guess what. The Firewall started notifying numerous outgoing connection attempts even before I opened any webpage! WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers. But that's not the end of the story. I've installed the classic version of WF so that it would run on my older Mac. What could be worse than an unashamed privacy infringement? WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD. Luckily for me the SSD survived the hard off but one thing is proven for sure: WF is to be avoided at all costs.
- MrAlex94 5y ago
  Unfortunately with the way Gecko is structured, the browser requires a lot of connections to the Firefox Remote Settings Server, for: * OpenH264 Codec for H264 playback * Widevine (if you enable DRM, it's disabled by default on Waterfox) * Extension blocklists * Phishing/malware website blocklists * Certificate downloads and HSTS Preload Lists * Captive portal detection * And a few other security related bits and bobs I can't remember off the top of my head. I did try to migrate to offline dumps so these things would only get updated at browser update time, but it causes a few issues with the browser doing so. > WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers. That would be rather shocking to me if it's true - the browser should be making requests to download things, but not upload anything? If this isn't the case do let me know what is going where as that is most definitely not by design! > WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD. That is definitely not ideal, but unfortunately Classic is very long in the tooth now and compatibility is getting harder with each release. Sorry you had those issues though, definitely not what we want happening.

mastrsushi 5y ago

Ambitious, but absolutely not "the fastest browser in existence"

guilhas 5y ago
Strangely the fastest Firefox based, until recently at least, the latest Firefox release also seems quite an improvement

nextaccountic 5y ago

Is this related to Firefox? The name suggests it, but the page doesn't say

Jowsey 5y ago
Its big thing originally was being a 64-bit port of Firefox. I assume it's still based on Firefox in some way, based on the name, but not really sure what it brings to the table anymore, besides some minor stuff you can already get with extensions.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Its thing nowadays is being a fork of a Firefox release old enough to still support XUL. Which means it's effectively a 4+ year old version of Firefox, with no renderer isolation and no support for most web features added in the last four years.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    > effectively a 4+ year old version of Firefox, with no renderer isolation and no support for most web features added in the last four years Okay, hilarious. “Impressive that they’re keeping it up to date while maintaining XUL support”, I thought. Never mind.
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  > besides some minor stuff you can already get with extensions Waterfox supports extensions that are no longer supported by Firefox.

iota8 5y ago

Not much information on the home page on why to use this and not Firefox. As this is derivative of Firefox, then what does it add over Firefox?

metagame 5y ago
It doesn't ship ads in your web browser, unlike Firefox. It allows you to install WebExtensions from any source (even if you don't sign them with Mozilla!), unlike Firefox. I wouldn't recommend it, but that's just because I wouldn't recommend any web browser right now.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  >It doesn't ship ads in your web browser Well, Waterfox is owned by an advertising company.
  - metagame 5y ago
    Sure, and I'm not saying it's good for privacy. But Firefox in its default setting is also bordering unusable, inserting ads in the address bar! It's incredible that an advertising company does better than a for-profit owned by a non-profit in this regard.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      Sorry, context for this? I take a pretty thorough scalpel to removing any traces of sponsored content from Firefox, and it never occurred to me that they might have ads in the address bar. Is there a previous discussion an announcement about this?
      - metagame 5y ago
        They added it unannounced in the last update, Firefox 93. There was a small outrage on behalf of the dozens of people still paying attention to Firefox, but nothing came of it. If you're on a good distribution, you'll probably see it disabled by default.

deleted 5y ago

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pndy 5y ago

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10554083 And the one on acquisition by System1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 It's my choice for "sandbox" browser - as in doing all stuff that I wouldn't want to do on Vivaldi.

Sillzen 5y ago
What do you mean by "stuff that I wouldn't want to do on Vivaldi"?
- sul_tasto 5y ago
  Vivaldi is also a web browser: https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/
  - Sillzen 5y ago
    Indeed, but I am unsure what OP would want to avoid doing on Vivaldi but would be happy to do on Waterfox.
    - aasasd 5y ago
      Dirty stuff probably. Wouldn't want to taint the primary workhorse by association with ogling naked people and buying weed.
- pndy 5y ago
  Vivaldi is set to be very strict when it comes to ads and tracking, and that affects sometimes how sites works. I've set Waterfox to be more "liberal"; it's for dirty-dirty stuff and dirty stuff. I'm also using it as a kind of sentiment I feel to Gecko engine. I'm not using Firefox since v60 - one of updates damaged my profile in an unrecoverable way.

iszomer 5y ago

There's also LibreWolf.

rapnie 5y ago
Thanks. Didn't know about this one. The site is here: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
- throwaway134183 5y ago
  Years ago together with another guy I created LibreFox. I came up withe the original concept that is still used (No telemetry, private search, uBlock Origin by default, default security and privacy settings). We quickly heard from Mozilla's lawyers: "Eliminate the Fox from your name or we sue you!". So we abandoned the project, but seeing the website you posted, my concept has lived on, and the gitlab seems to be pretty active as well!
- aloisdg 5y ago
  I still think that WindWolf or WaterWolf would have been better. Like it though :)
solarkraft 5y ago
LibreWolf may be a great and private browser for simple websites, but it’s definitely not your gateway to modern web applications. It locks down so much through a configuration override that a good chunk of modern web functionality just won’t work (WebRTC, for example). I gave up after about 5 times of looking up a problem and changing the configuration file without an end in sight. They go a bit far for my taste.
c80e74f077 5y ago
This. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I use Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, along five other browsers, on a 2008 iMac. Waterfox is stable and workable for me. I use Vimium-FF for keyboard things. My use case: I only visit a few sites, including this one, and rarely click the article links here. I really like it, it is like a Firefox which has been through obedience school, and now knows how to behave itself. Definitely in my top-10 favorite post-2015 browsers.

lelandfe 5y ago
> I use Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, along five other browsers Interesting - would you mind sharing what you use the others for?
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  The thing I do by far the most is testing my own websites. I love the Web and I believe strongly in Any Browser, so I regularly test in a whole variety of browsers to ensure compatibility. I try to dogfood this as much as possible. For example, I'm posting this with Firefox 3.6.

schipplock 5y ago

Will there be an AArch64 build for macOS?

solarkraft 5y ago

As pointed out in another comment [0], apparently it’s extremely outdated. Other comments describe it as unstable and lacking Apple Silicon builds. If you’re just looking for a version of Firefox without the user-hostile parts, this ain’t exactly it. From my months-old research such a thing doesn’t really seem to exist yet, but I definitely think it should. It could perhaps initially be shipped as a set of patches to be done on top of an existing Firefox installation. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816443

bscphil 5y ago
> If you’re just looking for a version of Firefox without the user-hostile parts LibreWolf seems like an attempt at this: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
- solarkraft 5y ago
  I don’t think it is. If it is, it’s pretty bad at it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816990
  - bscphil 5y ago
    Hmm. You're right that they are trying to do more than just that, they're trying to make a browser with an "off by default" policy for anything potentially privacy impacting. Personally, I haven't done any more than check it out, but I did end up switching back most of their changed settings. I think the end game for this probably ought to be an interface that appears post-install and asks you to choose a set of privacy-friendly options (which may break things), or enable all web technologies (which may impact privacy). That seems the user-respecting thing to do to me. Still, though, I'm glad that privacy-by-default, no unexpected connections out of the box, is something that someone is working on.
MrAlex94 5y ago
This doesn’t paint a clear picture. There are two versions of Waterfox: Classic, based on Gecko 56 that has backported security patches (but is not recommended to be used unless you are desperate to use XUL extensions) and the 3rd Generation (G3) based on ESR releases. Waterfox Classic is based on XUL and while we back port security patches as best we can, I always try motivate existing users to migrate to the newer versions. I’m not going to force an upgrade on Classic users as it will break their current setup and instead leave it their choice. We follow the ESR release currently for “current” versions (the default download on the website) and since ESR78 didn’t support ARM on macOS there were no builds for it. Now that we have the beta out for the ESR91 version, ARM support for macOS is available: https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G4.0.0b2 https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G4.0.0b2 I’d like to think that Waterfox G3+ does fit in your criteria.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

The problem is, it's very old, and with Firefox, the good stuff comes with the last versions. Especially, modern Firefox is wicked fast, while just a few versions before, it was less so. The difference is _staggering_. I think there is a space for add ons to setup Firefox to be more privacy focused. It's easier to maintain than a fork: compiling on so many targets such a huge software is very hard.

fartcannon 5y ago
On my phone, I have the newest version of Firefox Fennec and IceCatMobile (ancient and barely supported) - they both launch and function at, as far as I can see, exactly the same speed. Where is this speedup you mention actually found?
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  While I do use Firefox on mobile, I'm talking about the desktop version, like most people do. The latest rendering improvements are showing great results, and hardware acceleration on Linux is now on part with Windows, so it's fantastic to use on a modern laptop.
  - kiwijamo 5y ago
    Does Firefox do hardware acceleration for videos yet? It still does it in software by default on Linux as far as I know, unless this has changed recently?
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Don't know, videos are seemless but I got a very powerful CPU.

jccalhoun 5y ago

I keep it installed because the old pre-webextension version of downthemall can download some things the new version doesn't. But I only use it like once a month or so. I don't see any reason for me to use it on a regular basis.

MrAlex94 5y ago
If you're interested, DownThemAll has been ported to support newer Gecko versions: https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master/extensions/DownThemAll https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master... Waterfox G3+ supports installing bootstrapped/XPCOM extensions :-)

Svperstar 5y ago

I stopped using Waterfox back in like 2010-2012(not sure the exact year) and switched to Cyberfox. Then to Chrome, back to Firefox. I don't see any point in using Waterfox in 2021.

warent 5y ago

Curious to know why is it so complicated to build a web browser? Yes, they're probably the most complex piece of software humans have ever created. That being said, it seems like it would be possible to create a browser that handles all of the most common use cases, so ~90% of your browsing experience. Sure, maybe you need years and dozens of engineers for the final 10% but who cares about that bit? Wouldn't people be willing to accept this feature tradeoff for a new, user-friendly browser?

johnday 5y ago
The problem is that due to complexity accrued over time, the 10% of features you speak about are likely going to be core to the operation of the web's most popular sites (FAANMG). And not supporting those sites means not supporting a huge swath of the population who consider those sites critical.
zie 5y ago
Think re-writing 100% compatibility with MS windows and how much a of pain in the butt that would be. Wine has been at it for 28 years and they still haven't really managed. A web browser these days is arguably of similar complexity.
ivoras 5y ago
Which complex parts would you omit? If you omit video playing, you've prevented people from using YouTube and Netflix. If you omit compositing graphics on top of this video, you've again prevented YouTube and Netflix from showing UI. If you omit canvas and SVG, fancy modern parallax scrolling sites will not load. If you omit WebGL, another half of modern sites which just use it for a rotating logo won't load. Etc, etc... you really can't release a non-100% feature-full browser these days.
dvogel 5y ago
That would have been more possible a decade ago when the web browsers were less compatible and sites relied on the lowest common denominator feature set. With the increase in compatibility sites now rely on libraries that each depend on a different 90% of the feature set. Breaking interactions between those dependencies has a cascade effect that leads to really, really, really frustrating experiences today. e.g. a UI that looks perfect and has interaction effects working but a background interaction fails silently. A decade ago compatibility issues were more common but IME they were less frustrating because there was usually a rendering artifact or foreground error that made it clear the author just didn't support your browser.

sandGorgon 5y ago

this is so cool! no mobile ? any learnings here as you attempt to build browsers for the app stores.