Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Waterfox, a popular fork of Firefox, is saying nay to AI. Considering how unpopular Mozilla's plan to botify its browser has become, this could win the alternative some converts. The latest post on the Waterfox blog even says right in its URL that it is a "response to Mozilla." In it, lead developer Alex Kontos says: …

[DoctorNine]

Imagine...

A world wide netweb with no AI slop.... A clean drink of Waterfox? Perhaps. Perhaps.

[kneedragon]

Re: Imagine...

Even if Mozilla is going to add an AI kill switch, that may not be enough to reassure many.

----

Yes, that is what you say. That has been part of my decision to get one (a waterfox) and have a look at it.

I am far from sure what they're actually talking about, in terms of being AI free, because as far as I can see, Waterfox does exactly the same things as all the other cases of firefux in drag. Maybe in about:config there's a couple of options shut down that are open normally, but apart from that, it doesn't seem to be anything different to (say) Floorp.

I am not saying they're telling fibs, at all, I am saying having the three of them running side by side in the same host, the same Linux virtualMachine, or in a Windows virtual machine, or on several machines at once ~ I can't see the slightest difference on what Waterfox does compared to the other two.

"Have you actually tried using the AI?"

No, I haven't ~ the browsers have. How much CPU does it take to sync two different instances of a browser? Line up the history and bookmarks and some of the settings? Does it take 33 ~ 50% of the CPU power of 4 threads of an i7-6700? Does 2 VMs with two browswers running at the same time, normally take up 100% of a 6700 CPU when you run them? Because I'd say that's AI ~ not some complicated and spectacularly inefficient algorith.

Algorithms don't get written and passed and included that are that HORRIBLY FUKKIN INEFFICIENT! That's AI trying to run like it has a 16 core Ryzen 9000 under it, when it has 4 threads in a Virtualbox running on a 6700 that's a decade old.

If you'vre seen one fire-fux, you've seen all of them. Ask Nikki Lauda.

[Roopee]

+1 for Waterfox

It’s one of my daily drivers, alongside LibreWolf, Floorp and Supermium, depending on which OS I’m on. Previously I mainly used Pale Moon.

I never use Chrome on my own PCs, and rarely Firefox these days. I’m sure many here are similar, it’s a shame the message hasn’t reached the masses and the management...

Edit: forgot to mention iCab Mobile on my iThings.

[David 132]

Re: +1 for Waterfox

Upvote for the mention of iCab Mobile. Yes, I know it's effectively just a re-skin of Safari like every other browser in Apple's walled garden, but it's very user-centric and the developer is super responsive.

[DrewPH]

Sound of spraying coffee

TheZeldaZone owes me a new keyboard...

Good article. I like need FF's isolated containers but hate AI so may try Waterfox. Thank you.

[DrewPH]

Re: Sound of spraying coffee

And I see that the macOS download of Waterfox is currently at version 6.6.6 which I will take as a good omen.

[DrewPH]

Re: Sound of spraying coffee

Postscript: now on Waterfox. Everything transferred over including my userChrome.css, all extensions working, all configs configged. Happy Drew.

[Andrew Barr]

Re: Sound of spraying coffee

That quote is now locked in to my memory banks for other systems/people who screw themselves by making a stupid change!!

[Nerf Herder]

Re: Sound of spraying coffee

> TheZeldaZone owes me a new keyboard...

Same here. I'm still chuckling a day later.

[blu3b3rry]

Been happily using Waterfox for a year or so now. It reminds me of how Firefox used to be a few years ago before all the AI slop and unwanted features.

[katrinab]

Do they have an ARM64 build for Windows? I couldn't find one, which is why I am still using Firefox.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Waterfox for a while. It's Firefox with less stuff...does what it says on the tin.

Only issue I've had with it is when I visit stuff that detects agent string for compatibility...so I tend to run Waterfox with a Firefox agent string...which is fine.

[Arthur the cat]

Only issue I've had with it is when I visit stuff that detects agent string for compatibility

We're a quarter of the way through the 21st century. There are still sites that do that???

[keithpeter]

Yes.

Sadly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but if you're using a mainstream browser (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari) you won't ever notice it...but if you stray into the work of browser forks, you definitely notice it...but as long as your fork doesn't stray too far, functionally, from the mainstream browser it forked you can just switch your agent string and you'll be fine.

Juggling agent strings is par for the course for Linux...there are sites that deliberately restrict or change functionality if they see certain operating systems in your agent string.

A good example of this, and an easy one to test, is the Windows Media Creation Tool download page. Visit that page on Windows, you get a download link for the tool...visit on Linux, you get a direct download for the ISO and not the tool.

Sometimes not being detected as Windows is an advantage, like in this situation...but sometimes it can be a massive pain in the ass.

There is no need for this sort of thing anymore, you're quite right, but it doesn't stop people doing it...switching your agent string to Firefox on Windows rather than Firefox on Linux doesn't usually break anything...in a lot of cases, it's a cheap way to make the site appear to work differently as some kind of "security through obscurity" measure...because hackers use Linux right?

[retiredFool]

Thanks

For the article and positive comments. I'll try getting wet tomorrow and see how it goes.

[retiredFool]

Re: Thanks

Probably no one is going to see this, but after a week or so with waterfox all good. Hope they maintain their no ai slop approach.

[Anonymous Coward]

It’s damn hot here

Going to cool off in the water

[Bebu sa Ware]

"That Hasn't Hit Itself In The Dick With A Hammer"

I hadn't seen that absolute gem. The acronym THHIITDWAH is somewhat onomatopoeic when the "n't" is omitted.

That latter version is seemingly all the rage at the moment.

I would be happier less with a run time kill switch which could potentially be reenabled by malevolent addons and javascript, than a compiler switch CFLAGS+=—LEAVE_MY_DICK_ALONE=1

God only knows what the female part of the population think of this — the boys playing with themselves… again. — presumably.

[W.S.Gosset]

HIITDWAH

HIITDWAH works excellently for the ongoing & accelerating anti-user self-immolation we've been watching in the software world over the last 10-15yrs.

Q: "Why are you angry about the upgrade?"

A: "HIITDWAH."

[Pickle Rick]

THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

See also: JOZXYQK - It's the sound you make when you get your sexual organs trapped in something.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

Organs, plural,?

[heyrick]

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

Well, there's those little dangly things to either side. They won't much like being hit with a hammer either.

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

The medical term is "clock-weights."

[milliemoo83]

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

Pint of eerskib.

[blcollier]

Re: THHIITDWAH/HIITDWAH - Good For Scrabble

Is it in the dictionary?

It could be, if you're reading in the nude and you close the book too fast - JOZXYQK!

[coredump]

demon water, foxes and moons

At least some of the BSD's can do without Mozilla's latest AI shenanigans

$ uname -sr

FreeBSD 14.3-STABLE

$ pkg search waterfox

waterfox-6.6.6,1 Distilled fork of Firefox

$ waterfox --version

BrowserWorks Firefox 140.6.0esr

Same for FreeBSD 15.0 fwiw. Unfortunately NetBSD hasn't got it, but it does have Palemoon and a different Fox:

$ uname -sr

NetBSD 11.0_BETA

$ pkgin search palemoon

palemoon-33.8.2 Customizable web browser (unofficial distribution of Pale Moon)

$ pkgin search arcticfox

arcticfox-46.1nb1 Web browser for aging systems, forked from Firefox

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: demon water, foxes and moons

>pkgin search palemoon

Because it's a browser I'd recommend always get the latest version. For Pale Moon go to

http://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml

[Liam Proven]

Re: demon water, foxes and moons

> $ pkgin search arcticfox

> arcticfox-46.1nb1 Web browser for aging systems, forked from Firefox

I do not know if this is the same ArcticFox as the Mac one, but if so, it's very badly dated.

[keithpeter]

Re: demon water, foxes and moons

Yes, ArcticFox is a very old fork and I'm guessing mainly provided on NetBSD for people running ancient hardware. I used it on a 32bit Intel based T42 laptop (one processor, 1Gb RAM). Within those limits it actually works well. Mainly on text based or old-school Web sites.

[coredump]

Re: demon water, foxes and moons

This arcticfox looks dated, yes.

I did a quick install of palemoon on my 1.2GHz VIA NetBSD 11.0_BETA amd64 and it seems decent for basic things. Absent waterfox, I'd probably use that when/if Firefox becomes untenable.

[Always Right Mostly]

Why does everything these days have to be the result of a bunch of assholes sitting in a room asking "How can we make life more intolerable? How can we suck harder?"

[Neil Barnes]

Strange you should ask: I've just ordered Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' for a little winter reading.

[Adair]

I suspect that in most cases the answer is very simple, and sadly predictable: 'money grubbing'+FOMO.

[Pickle Rick]

Allow me to FTFY

> Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor.

Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of untrusted bloatware. Firefox has become an anchor around our neck - FTFY.

[Dan 55]

Re: Allow me to FTFY

Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor.

They've tried that before, buying up things like Pocket or setting up services only to later shut them down, so this will be about as successful. As well as spending it on CxOs for... what? Certainly not their insightful business acumen.

The only thing Mozilla had to do was take the money from Google and write a good browser. And instead of the money extraction vehicle they've got now so a non-profit can pay a huge amount of money to CxOs, have some kind of flattish technical-driven structure to achieve that (e.g. Valve, LibreOffice).

[keithpeter]

Re: Allow me to FTFY

I'm getting a strong Gerald Ratner vibe from this new Mozilla boss. Hope I'm wrong (he is from a technical background).

[Will Godfrey]

Any Waterfoxy here

I used to use Palemoon, but that got further and further behind, and switched to Waterfox about six months ago - definitely the best of the bunch now.

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: Any Waterfoxy here

With google continually and disgracefully adding non-standard extensions to the standards, everybody else is playing catchup. So at any point in time who is furtherest behind is chopping and changing. It would be interesting if someone sat down and did a fair and honest feature by feature comparison of the latest versions of the several firefox forks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ... of the several firefox forks.

"fireforks", perhaps? :-)

[Pulled Tea]

So…

I'm really looking forward to giving this a try, but I was interested in how they framed their argument against other Firefox forks by saying that it has a “formal policies and a legal entity”, and that this provides “accountability that many browser projects simply don’t have”.

I mean, sounds great! But apart from the fact that they've registered themselves as a company with what looks like a single employee is… kind of concerning? Like I see a Terms of Service, a Privacy Policy, and… not a lot of other things. Sure, WaterFox has Widevine, which… you know what, I don't like it, but if you want to access streaming services, you kind of need it, it's just the debased way the web is right now, so it's not nothing, and it tells me that someone went through the process of getting that into their code. So there is an org.

But, like, you can't sell the whole “governance” and “legal entity” schtick and expect me to be all right with barely any information about what the organization behind Waterfox is, and how we can find out more. Maybe I want to donate, but before I do that I want to know how you've been spending the money you've received in donations. Maybe I want to see if there's a democratic way of contributing to the project and steer it. Like, what are you? A non-profit? A for-profit company? What?

There's plenty to say about what Mozilla's doing, but for all their faults you kind of know that they're an organization that you can hold accountable. And normally I wouldn't give a hoot, but when you're selling me that you're better than the other reindeer because you've got “formal policies” and “governance”, one does expect some kind of governance other than an email address and social media pages. I mean, you got me interested, right.

[Liam Proven]

Re: So…

> they've registered themselves as a company with what looks like a single employee

A few years ago Kontos went to work with an ad vendor, System 1, as I mentioned last time:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/

«

The project is not without its own controversies, such as its purchase by ad vendor System1.

»

A year or 2 later he left that deal. I suspect that the current legal setup was a hasty way to give this some legal basis, but I don't know.

[MrReynolds2U]

which raises the question...

Is this likely to affect Thunderbird?

[Liam Proven]

Re: which raises the question...

> Is this likely to affect Thunderbird?

_Excellent_ question.

T'bird is MZLA *not Mozilla*, and MZLA is ostensibly for-profit. In other words, they are trying to win friends. I would like to think that they know their audience are old-timers who like trad tools, who are exactly the sort of people who do not want "AI".

If not... well, Betterbird is to Thunderbird as Waterfox is to Firefox...

[Kurgan]

Re: which raises the question...

I'm already on Betterbird and thinking on switching to waterfox or librewolf soon.

[Dan 55]

Re: which raises the question...

Thunderbird Assist which is currently an add-on and will hopefully remain that way.

[Dan 55]

"you may be wondering why today we've brought this hammer and pulled out our dick"

It's somehow timely and yet sums up every Mozilla announcement over the previous decade.

[Maurice Mynah]

Re: "you may be wondering why today we've brought this hammer and pulled out our dick"

I'm used to Firefox and have stuck with it. It's also "supported" at work. But this morning, attempting to reply to a Reg comment, an unexpected popup appeared, offering to "help" me with my reply.

I'm quite capable of generating my own hallucinatory nonsense, thank you Mozilla. Provide an off switch or I'm off.

[Johnb89]

I write this from Waterfox

+N for waterfox, which I've been using for a year. Its made my old intel Mac zip along nicely. I've given them money too, because that's how you support open source projects.

To those worried it is just one guy and all that... you can help make good things like waterfox successful by supporting them, with money if not dev time. And you watch the repo to see what's going on if you want to be sure, or you ask someone you trust who does that.

[Jurassic.Hermit]

Re: I write this from Waterfox

Perhaps the one man has a dog?

[xyz123]

Icefox...its Waterfox but windows 11 made it freeze solid. again.

[Floor1]

Floorp and BetterBird

I do use waterfox now and then but prefer floorp and BetterBird. I have to use them via flatpak because the packaging and repos are not available.

When webdevs only provide chrome based sites I am forced to use chromium or Vivaldi.

[heyrick]

Re: Floorp and BetterBird

Thankfully I don't need to do stuff on sites for my job, so if I come across a site that doesn't play friendly with my Firefox and paranoid level of script blocking, I'll allow scripts on that site only (and maybe a CDN if the name is obvious). If that doesn't work, I'll just close the tab and look for whatever elsewhere.

[fromxyzzy]

Re: Floorp and BetterBird

Floorp's current version has some AI stuff that is opt-out instead of opt-in. Search suggestions and some other things.

Once turned off, it's off, but it's there and you should check the settings to make sure it's off.

[jScrag]

Forget features, make it unbeatable

Dear Mozilla, please just focus on making it fast, efficient and secure, balls to new features. Don't add crap for the sake of it, you'll only invite criticism and disillusion (see above). Distil what makes it great (ad blocking, privacy options, not being chromium) and super-charge that.

[Ian Johnston]

Just tried it under Linux Mint but alas it does not support my processor - Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7400, says dmidecode - so I must search on for something without the AI crap which now makes Firefox all but unusable.

[Liam Proven]

> alas it does not support my processor

Oh dear! I checked and yes this was bumped recently:

https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.5.0/

Sorry to hear that. Waterfox Classic will probably still work fine, but you might be best off with an old Firefox ESR now. Version 115 is still updating for Windows 7 and macOS 10.13.

[Vocational Vagabond]

Don't worry, with masses forced to adopt Windows 11's TPM and 'TOPS' requirements, you could retire your core2 duo box (ethically), and still offset the e-waste mentality as there will be a new, growing pool of Linux friendly and perfectly performant hardware along shortly . .

[Kurgan]

There is already. Lots of series 6 and 7 Intel Core I3 i% and i7 processors that work just fine. These older machines are sold for bargain prices because they cannot run win11. Well, actually they WERE sold for bargain prices before the whole RAM / SSD shortage.

[Robert Feldman 1]

I also have a Core 2 Duo computer (Dell Precision T3400, purchased May 2008) that I have already upgraded from Windows 10 to Linux Mint. It works fine for my purposes and I do not want to replace it. It runs the current Firefox 146.0, but it looks like I will need to try some of the other non-AI browsers besides Waterfox.

[Mister Goldiloxx]

Was hoping for more non-(fake)AI options. DL'ed and trying it now!

[JibberX]

Flatpak FTW

This article made me realise that Waterfox do a Flatpak which as I am in Fedoraland is good for me.

For those who develop HTML locally, always remember to allow filesystem access (using Flatseal) to wherever you are comfortable, that's a real oddity of browser permissions out of the box.

(I'm sure Flatpaks are evil somehow, but I live with it)

[Anonymous Coward]

Like many, I suspect, I rarely change default browsers because its a nuisance. But thanks to the increasing bloat in firefox I'm giving Waterfox a try and am pleasantly surprised. It's like going back to Firefox from a decade ago - much faster at least on my somewhat ageing Mac. I'm sure there will be speedbumps but I'll likely stay with it, so Firefox is now Formerfox.

It's surprising to me that Mozilla are so out of touch with their core users, unless they are seeking further irrelevance.

[NiteDragon]

My favourite thing about uninstalling Firefox was that the 'tell us why' box redirected me to an 'install edge' page on the M$ store. I hope Firefox are getting some money from that at least.