TL;DR: As Mozilla moves to make Firefox an AI browser, people are looking at other options. Some people are rediscovering Waterfox, a browser that has been around for a decade from independent developer BrowserWorks. In this post, I interview the founder of Waterfox - Alex Kontos, and we discuss Waterfox’s history and look towards its future. We also talk about how Waterfox thinks about AI in the browser.

Just thought this was interesting. Someone sent me a link to a Bluesky post (not about Waterfox), and when I looked at the post I was surprised to see Waterfox on the trending sidebar. It is, of course, because of Mozilla's recent talk about embracing AI.

Hope this turns into more momentum for the project!

Almost 10 months ago, I posted in here that I was switching to Waterfox since Mozilla switched from the MPL to their own proprietary license.

After the initial transition, I pretty much used Waterfox like Firefox and there were only a few edge/corner cases where the browser did not function as expected. They were often fixed within a few days via a browser update.

An interesting bug has surfaced where the history database got corrupted and there was no way to repair it and I'm having to recreate my profile. While it's not the end of the world, it very annoying. I haven't been able to isolate why. I wish there was a way to script installing extensions and migrating settings.

Overall, it's doing what a browser should be doing. Showing me the web.

How are you all doing with it?

Do you remember the old days of Firefox when the statusbar used to an actual bar with stuff on it? Well, now you can have that.

At first I tried using the actual status bar - the one whose availability you can enable in settings and then choose whether it will show links or not. With some CSS for customizing the status bar, that would eventually leave you with a bar with two thick white lines that look like border and that won't go away no matter what you do. Again - that's a linux only problem! These lines are not present in the Windows version of Waterfox.

So, I took some time to play with that, I even asked an AI for help but no good - the desired status bar wouldn't appear as I wanted it. So I took another approach: I brought up the bookmarks bar. Since I'm not using it anyway, I decided to turn it into a status bar:

1. Bring up the bookmarks bar.
2. Go to settings and choose position for it - bottom.
3. Remove any bookmarks from it, if there are any.
4. Right click on it --> Customize toolbar --> Remove any elements from the bookmarks bar. Also remove the message "add bookmarks here". If you want, you can add the Zoom function (-|100%|+) and it automatically go to the right most part of the bookmarks bar, making it look even closer to the classic status bar. You can add other things to it, if you want - just not bookmarks, otherwise it will become a mess.
5. Open your profile dir which is usually located in ~/.waterfox/Profiles/randomname.default-release-1. Note that I can't tell you where EXACTLY this last directory is because I changed the location of mine long ago - so long ago that I don't even remember what its original location and name were. Anyway, once you find, enter the directory chrome (if you don't have it - create it) and then open/create a new file named userChrome.css. This file is responsible for the appearance of the browser. So, open/create it and paste this in it:

`#statuspanel { position: fixed !important; left: 0 !important; bottom: 0 !important; z-index: 9999 !important; }

#statuspanel-label { margin-left: 10 !important; border: none !important; padding: 10 !important; font-family: "Open Sans" !important; font-size: 18px !important; font-weight: bold !important; color: #E2B582 !important; }`

and your new status bar (after you restart the browser) will look like on the screenshot above. Ofcourse, you can change the font color, size or family to any values you want. These are my colors and font size and also just for the example on how to make this work.

The Waterfox version I did this with is G6 - 6.5.11.

The extension "Open With" wasn't working with Waterfox 6.5.10 but I managed to make it work with this version (and hopefully with all future versions). I've uploaded the fix + a short but detailed enough description on github.

6. How does Waterfox make money?

Waterfox has search partnerships. That is, the default search on Waterfox is monetised. If you search with it, Waterfox gets a share of the revenue. You are under no obligation to use the default search - but if you like what Waterfox does and want to support the project, please consider using it.

Source: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/

The first time I've heard about this browser was here on Lemmy maybe 20 minutes ago. A quick look at their webpage says that they use gecko as their web engine, but doesn't specify it bring a fork of Firefox.

To put this in context, most gecko based browsers I've heard about recently have also been Firefox forks. Is Waterfox a Firefox fork? And what does Waterfox do differently that should make people consider it more than Librewolf or another Firefox fork?

This is probably the alternative I will switch to on my macbook. We need to show that overpaid Mozilla ceo we're done with their games. I'm not having my data sold off to god knows where.

I've migrated both of my profiles on my Linux Mint desktop to Waterfox. I installed from tar which allows me to more easily integrate with Keepass -- Details in this thread. If you're using Keepass Browser integration, you'll need to install this way. But if you use a different password manager, you should be fine with flatpak or whatever your system uses for package management.

Migration from Firefox did not work -- I suspect this is a limitation on Waterfox as I also tried migration within Windows. I did attempt a straight profile copy, which did not work. While history, cookies, etc. looked like they came over fine, extensions struggled and it was hard to tell whether they actually were migrated.

So unfortunately, it's not an easy transition and it will be highly manual. Backup your bookmarks, passwords, etc. and import them. This also means any customization you made on addons (e.g. ublock origin settings, etc) will need to be imported as well. It helps if you have both Firefox and Waterfox open side by side and you can just go from one to the other.

My Windows laptop will be next week. I want to give my main driver to "bake" a bit before I do this on Windows.

So...AMA

I'm slowly piece mealing my way to Waterfox this weekend. One issue I've had is getting KeepassXC working.

I suspect this is more of a flatpak thing than a Waterfox thing. I'm not familiar with flatpak enough to know where I need to go to get it to work. If you have suggestions, let me know.

Right now I'm copying and pasting.