Disclaimer: very satisfied user of Waterfox talking ;)
But I believe Mozilla is making a fundamental mistake.
I believe that too, but I’m no millionaire CEO either.
Some will argue that AI browsers are inevitable, that we’re fighting against the tide of history. Perhaps. AI browsers may eat the world. But the web, despite having core centralised properties, is fundamentally decentralised. There will always be alternatives. If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along. We’ve been here before. When Firefox abandoned XUL extensions, Waterfox Classic preserved them. When Mozilla started adding telemetry and Pocket and sponsored content, Waterfox stripped it out. I like to think that where there is want for a browser that simply respects you, Waterfox has delivered.
Long live Waterfox.
This may sound silly to say, and it probably is, but to me it’s almost impossible to imagine I could one day stop being a Firefox user. I mean, my first Web browser was Mosaic, I followed it when it turned into Netscape, which I then followed as it became Netscape, before morphing into the giant Mozilla T-Rex, and finally becoming Firefox.
Take back the Web, I believe(d) in that. Heck, I still have one of their T-Rex t-shirt dedicated by a few of its devs.
I also have a chromium-based browser (Vivaldi) but Firefox has always been home to me (edit: so seeing it moving away from what I care for is not a great feeling). I’m so glad forks like Waterfox exist because if it was not for them, for the first time ever I would not know what browser I can trust.
I first started on Mosaic and Lynx! That was a lifetime ago.
I am still using lynx, everyday. Not for everything, but for most if my news and blog reading.
It feels great to not being bombarded by the flashy, distracting JavaScript gizmo du-jour. I want to read the content, I don’t care about the AI generated picture at the of the page, or the random picture of something half related to the article.
I believe everybody should build their website to be accessible with lynx.
Accessibility isn’t just following the standards and removing the mess from the modern web, it’s also making your site accessible for the people with eyesight problems for example…
I wish people would stop talking about “AI browsers” like everyone even knows what that actually means.
At this point nothing will stop me having a visceral negative reaction to AI being added to any product after literally every single other implementation in literally every other product has been annoying fucking dogshit. It could be the best thing ever and I’d still react negatively because I never want to hear the god damn word again.
Every company wants AI even though they have no idea how it helps their business or their company.
My grocery store app does not need AI when they can’t even get search right.
I wish everyone would stop talking about AI…
Firefox clones like librewolf and waterfox greatly increase the supply chain attack risk, but they seems more and more attractive every day
deleted by creator
We still need some organisational alternative to Mozilla. None of the privacy forks would survive Firefox going away.
Yes all the derivatives would die if Firefox went away.
Waterfox might have just got a new convert here.
Waterfox is fantastic! I also self host searxng and have it set as the default search engine in waterfox. private search!
Im looking at changing now.
Me also but to what?
To waterfox instead of Firefox
male to female
I just switched from Firefox to waterfox. It took less than five minutes, and the installation is quite straightforward on Linux. Move the folder to opt, make a symlink, and create a .desktop. The instructions are on the website. I suggest switching the default search to duckduckgo.
Will they have an android version on f droid ? Prefer not to use Google play…
No https://search.f-droid.org/?q=waterfox and they don’t seem to list it on their official page either. Please show your interest at https://github.com/BrowserWorks/waterfox/issues/4002
I just switched to it on my android. Set as default. So far so good. Never heard of it until today.
Check out Vivaldi’s Roadmap for 2026 😀
not AI, and still not open source either
and chromium based
Jokes aside, is Vivaldi good? Is it worth looking into even tho it’s just another chromium browser?
Yes, using it since 10 years as main browser. It’s the most advanced browser out there, good privacy, great ethics to the user by this EU company (employee owned cooperative in Norway), perfect transparency, great community, and yes it isn’t OpenSource, but source available (https://github.com/ric2b/Vivaldi-browser, https://vivaldi.com/source/), the proprietary part (5% of the UI script is 100% auditable and even moddeable by the user, in the forum they show how (naturally at own risk)). It’s Chromium based (de-googled), but not a simple fork like other.
All that is very intriguing. Chromium based browser make me weary, but Im willing to add it to my rotation of browsers. Thanks for the response.
This reply exchange reads like astroturfing.
Not my intent, I was honestly curious what separated Vivaldi from the dozens of other Blink browsers. Also, I’m earnestly interested in pushing my preconceived notions to the side and giving a new browser a test run.
It’s very good! Honestly, try it. I use it on Android, Linux and Windows. Very customizable and pro-user, nice community.
It’s based on Chromium but they declared they’ll keep supporting Manifest v2 extensions (uBlock Origin etc.) how long it will be virtually possible even though Chrome blocked them.
Yeah, I had heard they are doing a lot to leverage chromium, but also distance themselves from it as much as they reasonably can. I’ll definitely have to give it another try, it just takes a lot for me to swallow the fact that’s chrome based browsers have to rely on google to some extent, but I’m intrigued by their way for doing it.
I’m currently in the process of switching to Waterfox while I wait to see what Ladybird can do, and so far I’m pretty happy with my decision.
Don’t get me wrong I hate LLMs being shoved down our throats, but I think the “Mozilla using AI” stuff is overblown. The few LLM features they’ve implemented are useful and non-intrusive. I actually think it’s a rare example of the tech being used intelligently (no pun intended).
I could not disagree more. a browser is a local piece of software to me that I use to connect to a variety of servers. It having an ai server its communicating with all the time and with access outside the add on system is not something I want. I have looked at and was not put off by other firefox “controversies” but this one is making it where it is not simply a browser anymore. which is what I want.
Well you’re in luck because the translation feature is local https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
this does not make me happier. I can turn it off but if im going to run a local llm I rather do that as its own piece of software. Its funny because I have mentioned I would like to see a linux operating system using a local llm where its acting a bit like the change from text based to gui based operating systems. I don’t want every piece of software operating a local llm to do its job or a part of its job on my computer. Its great I can turn it off but I don’t want to be downloading an llm model with every piece of software and just turn it off for my browser and my office suite and anything else im running. Its actually worse with the browser that already has taken over so much of the application space as a kind of universal tool.
These things have been incredibly intrusive. They even added a whole sidebar to take up more space like they were fucking Yahoo and this was IE.
Weird, I don’t have a new AI sidebar and I’m running the latest version.
I’ve been distro hopping lately, and I’ve discovered that if you don’t turn the sidebar off before you log into your Mozilla account, it will turn the sidebar back on on all of your other Firefoxes (as well as other settings like the studies).
i’ve been pretty disallusioned with Mozilla leadership
i’ve jumped back to Chrome for the time being
i’ll be moving to servo/verso as soon as it meets my needs
That’s a wild take. That’s like saying you’re uncomfortable in the sauna so you moved to the desert.
