7 ms·
15 Years of Forking
- keyle 6mo agoInteresting I've never heard of waterfox before. Looks interesting!
- lproven 6mo agoI've covered it a few times on the Register. :-) 5Y ago: https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork... Last year: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/18/firefox_no_ai_alternative_waterfox/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/18/firefox_no_ai_alterna... This year: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/just_the_browser/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/just_the_browser/
- mrbluecoat 6mo agoI love how "15 Years of Forking" is right next to "There is no Spoon" on the HN homepage right now :D
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 6mo agoEveryone starts out pure but then the lucre calls. > Waterfox’s approach of allowing text ads on the default search partner page is our own decision for sustainability "Sustainability" indeed.
- kev009 6mo agoDid you read the same article as me? The word is singularly used in the context of how do you earn money as a project, i.e. sustain the effort. It's a bit of a leap to imply this is impure unless they made some contract stating the opposite or are doing something dark.
- renewiltord 6mo ago[flagged]
- HDBaseT 6mo agoYou can however of course swap out the default Search Engine with Google or whatever privacy focused replacement (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, etc).
- chii 6mo agoYou either die an open source project, or live long enough to see yourself become ad-driven in the name of sustainability. Firefox has already done so to google, and when a fork is big enough, they certainly will hear the siren's call.
- renewiltord 6mo agoYou’re right 100% The guy literally sold his browser to an online advertising company and then bought it back. Why do you think startpage is the default? Look up the online advertising company that owns it and then look up who he sold the browser to before taking it back.
- ThrowawayTestr 6mo agoHave you ever sent a donation to Alex?
- renewiltord 6mo agoWhy would I donate to someone who is willing to sell my attention?
- pedrogpimenta 6mo agoDid you do it before they did so?
- renewiltord 6mo agoLooks like I judged them well in not doing so. I would have been such a sucker. After all, donating to corporations is for bootlickers. https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/ https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/ So they’re just shilling their own search product on their own browser. No different from Google and Chrome. Except with some corporate bootlicking from running dog lackeys. He literally sold it to an online advertising company lol. EDIT: haha, the best defence of this guy you guys can muster is "If you don't pay me, I'll sell your data to online advertising companies" and that this is some kind of good thing.
- ThrowawayTestr 6mo agoMaybe if you donated some money he wouldn't have had to.
- akoboldfrying 6mo agoI'm impressed by how thoroughly you ignored the question of whether your own inaction was partly responsible for the outcome that occurred later, and which you dislike. It has persuaded me that your own inaction was totally unrelated to this outcome.
- pedrogpimenta 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- sersi 6mo agoI mean first thing I do in any browser is change the search engine so it's not like it affects me in any way. I don't expect opensource projects to never make deals that give them some money, I just want them to be fully transparent when they do. Waterfox is transparent and clearly states who and how they sell their user data to.
- jameshush 6mo agoHad the pleasure of working with Alex while at System1. Great guy. If I remember correctly I got one tiny change merged into Waterfox that's probably since been undone in the years since :-).
- tommica 6mo agoThe ads on default search partner is a fine compromise - reality is that projects need money, and if this helps them (and makes it less dependant on donations) then great! As long as the ad blocking happens elsewhere, it is fine. I need to move back to waterfox again...
- MrAlex94 6mo agoYes, enabled everywhere - and it will just be a simple toggle to also enable it on the search partner page, no hoops to jump through.
- Vinnl 6mo agoReminds me of Netscape Navigator adding a popup blocker, but also adding the ability to allowlist sites - so that it could have the Netscape website allowlisted by default.
- ErigmolCt 6mo agoThis is how we keep the lights on
- kevinbaiv 6mo ago[flagged]
- MrAlex94 6mo agoI've tried a few ways - people are generous with donations, but you can't really live off of it and I have a subscription based search service, but people just aren't willing to pay. This is basically the only potential way I can keep this going, even then there may not be much uptake, but it's a hail Mary.
- lowdude 6mo agoI came across Waterfox a number of times over the years, but I think it will be difficult to get a similar amount of reach for your search engine. In particular, on the home page of Waterfox, there is nothing even hinting at the existence of the search service. Maybe this is intentional, as it is in public beta for now, but I think it would help to at least note its existence there, or near the `donate` section (as a means of support, rather than direct donation). Also make sure that this directly exists as one of the search engine options for Waterfox, if it isn't already, every click involved in the setup will make it easier for people to try out. But charging $5 / $10 for basically what StartPage does (to the best of my understanding) is going to be a tough pitch either way. Out of interest, what would the pricing for the Google API look like, if you had no other costs involved?
- BoredPositron 6mo agoSorry, I still can't get over the system1 shit in 2020.
- MrAlex94 6mo agoI get the scepticism but IMO the reaction at the time was rough and I partially get why. System1 is a search syndication company. Their business is contextual ads on search results - no PII, no tracking profiles, no behavioural targeting. It's functionally the same model as DuckDuckGo. If I'd sold to DDG, I don't think anyone would've batted an eyelid. I get it, the timing (privacy browser sold to company with "ad" in its description) looked terrible in a headline and I take responsibility for not communicating it better at the time, which I feel like wouldn't have led to such a massive furor.
- kajika91 6mo agoI am surprise there is no mention of Librewolf here. The differences of Librewolf and Waterfox is pretty hard to grasp, I am digging a little bit but so far I guess I would say using any of them is still way better than the main alternatives. Librewolf is, to me, the way better alternative as this is really in the FOSS mindset : a tool for everyone to use and by anyone to contribute. Seeing their plateform alone (Lemmy/Matrix/Codeberg, they also have a reddit community it seems) you can already see this is an other world than Waterwolf's bluesky/reddit/github. To be fair I can understand the SNS part but the github is a big redflag to me. As usual I can see people that are very probably sincere in their goals not realizing the way they are going will lead to the usual enshitification: company focus, brave dependency, etc. I note that Waterfox seems to legally originate from UK and it is refreshing to have an ecosystem that is not centralized in 1 country : for the sake of everyone it is better not to rely to much on 1 legislator (see age verification for instance).
- MrAlex94 6mo agoLibrewolf and Waterfox have always had different goals. Waterfox has always had a more opinionated take on defaults and privacy. Essentially the goal has been keep the web as private as possible without breaking it (I know Librewolf is more aggressive there and that sometimes leads to website breakages) and I think I've managed that well, especially with the implementation of Oblivious DNS by default. The upside of Librewolf being a community project is also IMO its downside - there isn't any accountability and with the current climate around the world becoming more hostile to online services, I think governance is hugely important, which is why I've tried to collate everything as much as I can: https://www.waterfox.com/docs/policies/company-information/ https://www.waterfox.com/docs/policies/company-information/ At the end of the day, if something goes wrong, at least with Waterfox I can be held accountable.
- adrianwaj 6mo agoThere was a recent comment: "if you don't know: any browser extension can read input/password fields across all site(s) you gave it access to (yeah, it's crazy but unfortunately true)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553048 Would either WF or LW fix that? Is it true?
- zettabomb 6mo agoI remember using Waterfox when it was new. I moved away from it when Firefox started pushing 64 bit builds natively, and I've stuck with it since then. Recently though it does seem as if they might be going down a dark path, so perhaps I'll consider switching again. I remember Waterfox was hard forked after Quantum became a thing, in order to keep support with XPI - is that still the case?
- MrAlex94 6mo agoThe hard fork was "Waterfox Classic", which just became unsustainable to maintain. Rather than support for XPI (which is just the packaging for Firefox webextensions), the current version of Waterfox does still support bootstrapped extensions - in theory anyone can still write one, with access to all the privileged JavaScript APIs typically not accessible to MV2/MV3 webextensions. It's not widely used though, there are two repos I'm aware of that take advantage of this: https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master/extensions https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master... https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus/ https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus/
- kaluga 6mo agowhether you use waterfox or librewolf, having anything outside of Blink is the only thing keeping the open web breathing.
- red_admiral 6mo ago> Mozilla: Break free from big tech - our products put you in control of a safer, more private internet experience. (Adds AI that needs 7 about:config entries to disable, until users roast it enough that they add an off switch.) > Waterfox: And we still don’t have AI in the browser. That hasn’t changed. The browser’s job is to load web pages, keep your data private, and get out of the way. It seems other browsers have forgotten that. At some point I think we should just redirect the Firefox funding to Waterfox.
- darkwater 6mo agoFrom TFA: > The original text implied Brave special cases ads on their search partner’s page - they don’t. Brave blocks third party ads on all websites by default, regardless of any partnership, and offers an additional aggressive mode that blocks first party ads as well. Waterfox’s approach of allowing text ads on the default search partner page is our own decision for sustainability, I would like to stress on the last sentence: Waterfox’s approach of allowing text ads on the default search partner page is our own decision for sustainability So basically they are permitting ads from their paying partners.
- MrAlex94 6mo agoI think that's an unfair framing. No one is paying Waterfox to allow ads - it's a revenue share from the default search engine (which I've always been transparent about)[1], same as every other independent browser that has a search partner. It's not an "acceptable ads" programme where advertisers pay to be whitelisted. [1] https://www.waterfox.com/docs/policies/revenue-model/ https://www.waterfox.com/docs/policies/revenue-model/
- darkwater 6mo agoWell, the default search engine is definitely your business partner, no? So they are getting a different tratment: default search engine (like in most other browsers, nothing fancy here) and their ads in their SERP are not blocked - at least by default - by the embedded ad-blocking engine of WaterFox. Isn't that correct? Happy to stand corrected, if it's the case.
- xacky 6mo agoThere is no pure browser anymore. The little red hen of Google funds everything, and forks like Waterfox just change a few parts of the UI but still rely on the upstream for all actual browser code. Even Mozilla was bootstrapped by AOL-Time Warner Back in the day. If you look at Ladybird they already have lots of ad companies funding it as well and will demand its enshittification if it gets popular.
- dijit 6mo agoThat 2019 logo looks fantastic. The modern logo reminds me of Microsoft Word for Mac 2010 :(
- totierne2 6mo ago20 years a forker?
- tgtweak 6mo agoAdless monetization is a very difficult challenge - something I've worked on many times over the years (compute-monetization, shopping-commission monetization, payment interchange monetization) and it's always been very difficult to compete with ads. I think the waterfox approach of "ads if you're OK with it" opt-in and sane defaults is the better one, but it's very difficult to make ends meat compared to competitors offering full monetization on by default when you're only getting it (and getting less per search) if users opt-in. Compute/resource monetization is the one after all these years that has done the best at replacing ads as a means of monetization for users, and it requires a very intelligent scheduling system + ethical ecosystem to work (most have just tried running crypto miners that cost users more electricity than they earn).
- tgtweak 6mo agoAlso, the fact waterfox has almost zero telemetry out of the box and doesn't even have a bonafide number for active users as a result is a good hint at how sincere the "anti-tracking" ethos is applied. Most open source applications have some form of telemetry, even "anonymous" telemetry - but this does really stand out.