this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
61 points (98.4% liked)

Privacy

37976 readers
445 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

https://www.waterfox.net/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/

all 27 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

just ignore it.

use librewolf, mullvad, or tor browser.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

+1 for Waterfox

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Presumably, there would be no dirt, since water cleans dirt off of foxes. spinny_fox, fox, spinny

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I’m wondering if I should use it as well. I know LibreWolf isn’t for me

[–] unicornBro 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Yea, it feels like the tor browser of clear web

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I've heard good things about Zen Browser if you want to give that a try.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I am currently using Floorp, which also adds plenty of features. Haven't tried Zen yet, but it looks interesting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah Tuff, give me some fresh dirt.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

That's pretty much it afaik. Owner sold it, new owner didn't know what to do with it, owner bought it back.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure System1 divested themselves of it.

They still own Startpage and Startmail, though.

[–] petri 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I use SearXNG. I would highly recommend.

[–] petri 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

TROM Search via https://search.trom.tf/?q=%25s will cycle through instances. Sometimes the results suck but you can simply rerun your query. This is what I currently use for everything by default.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Waterfox try to remove some blobs of Firefox out of the box, so it's better for the normal user

[–] sunth1ef 3 points 6 days ago

I have found that Waterfox is slightly, slightly faster on both Windows and Android and am loving it so far.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Because it makes a healthier base to work with or to simply use it without caring

Increasing privacy (and sometimes security)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

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.