Waterfox G4.0.3
Can Firefox-fanatic Jonni Bidwell be won over by water signs, debloating and a privacy boost?
Firefox has changed a lot over the past few years. NPAPI plugins were all but banished in 2017 when Firefox 52 was released. Firefox 57 (Quantum) brought a new look, a newly engineered browser engine and a new add-on architecture to replace the venerable XUL (XML User Interface Language).
The XUL architecture was powerful, perhaps too powerful since it enabled add-ons to do pretty much anything they wanted, including to other add-ons, the browser core or even the underlying operating system. XUL (and XPCOM, Mozilla’s bridge between C++ and JavaScript) gave a vibrancy to the Firefox add-on ecosystem, but given the security implications it was axed in favour of the new WebExtensions mechanism.
Such changes have their detractors, including, we dare say, the authors of the tens of thousands of addons that were broken by this change. As such, a number of Firefox forks and clones sprang up to keep XUL and classic add-ons alive: Pale Moon and Basilisk, for example. An even older edition was Waterfox by Alex Kontos, which started life in 2011 as a 64-bit custom Firefox build, at a time when Mozilla offered only 32-bit downloads. When in 2019 the Quantum revolution came, Waterfox bifurcated into Classic and Current branches, with the Current branch continuing to focus on modern Firefox (WebExtensions and all), and the Classic branch catering to the XUL platform.
Branching versions
We won’t say much more about Waterfox Classic, other than it’s hard to backport security fixes from modern Firefox into the old codebase (it’s based on Firefox 56) so if you visit https://classic.waterfox.net you’ll see a warning that it has “many unpatched security advisories”. The other branch, now just known as Waterfox because it’s where development is focused, is based on the Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release), currently 91. This means it lags behind Firefox proper in terms of new features, since those generally have to wait before they land in the ESR. But it also means there’s parity of landed bug fixes, as well as future bugfixes (which are easy for the project to digest thanks to a new CI build system). The project is now testing tracking against the central branch of the Gecko platform instead of the ESR branch, which (if it goes smoothly) means the project will become effectively a rolling release.
That funding for that build system came from a slightly sinister-sounding corner, namely System1, a marketing platform that acquired Waterfox in February 2020. This is in reality not very sinister at all, System1 collects search engine revenue in the same way Google do from Firefox. It doesn’t collect usage data or personal data. And Waterfox itself only collects “the bare minimum … needed to keep the browser running smoothly” and doesn’t send telemetry data.
Waterfox ships as a tar.bz2 archive, which makes it not particularly beginner friendly. But command line aficionados will have no problem running the program from their home directories. Waterfox’s default theme, Lepton, is compact and if you look hard enough has a fair few differences to Firefox).
Waterfox feels faster than Firefox, and it’s definitely lighter on resources. Our not very scientific test of opening Reddit, YouTube, Netflix and Future Towers’ awesome CMS saw the browser consume only around half the memory Firefox gobbled. Oh, and if you want to keep using Firefox Sync with it then you still can.