15 Years of Forking - Waterfox Blog
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Today marks 15 years of Waterfox!

Title and image from alternativeto.net, to unbury the lede, but linked to the original post.

This year will see Waterfox shipping a native content blocker built on Brave’s adblock library - and it’s worth explaining what that means and why.

The blocker runs in the main browser process rather than as a web extension, which means it isn’t subject to the limitations that extension based blockers like uBlock Origin face. It’s faster, more tightly integrated, and doesn’t depend on a separate extension process or require us to constantly pull in upstream updates. Brave’s adblock library is also mature - it has paid engineers working on it, a wide filterset, and crucially it’s licensed under MPL2, the same licence as Waterfox, which makes it a natural fit. uBlock Origin, as good as it is, carries a GPLv3 licence that would’ve created real compatibility headaches.

For how it works in practice: by default, text ads will remain visible on our default search partner’s page - currently Startpage. The idea is that this is what will keep the lights on. This mirrors the approach Brave takes with their search partner.

Users who want to disable that entirely can do so with a single toggle in settings, and it has nothing to do with any of Brave’s crypto or rewards ecosystem - we’re just using the adblocking library. Everyone else gets a fast, native adblocker out of the box, no extension required.

If you already use an adblocker, don’t worry, you can carry on using it. This will be enabled for new users or users who aren’t already using an adblocker.

In the meanwhile, Waterfox’s membership of the Browser Choice Alliance alongside Google and Opera, is pushing for fair competition and actual user choice in the browser market.

  • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    I don’t get all the negativity here. WaterFox is integrating something that will block more ads out of the box by default than it did before. So there is an exception. You can disable it with a switch.

    Firefox has shipped with similar tracker blockers enabled for years. They don’t do all the blocking either, but nobody’s gotten mad at Mozilla about offering partial protections.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      AFAIK Mozilla never shipped an adblocker with preferential treatment carved out for themselves.

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        They’ve never shipped an ad blocker, period. Sucks to be an iOS user…

        But Mozilla Firefox’s default search engines, plural, are sponsored - ie advertisement to the sites that pay them. The homepage stories? Ads. Top sites? Ads. Weather widget? An ad. Search suggestions? Ads.

        Mozilla baked an ad network data collector into their browser. But somehow people are mad because a fork is going to… Remove the ads. All the ads, if you flip a switch.

        • Rekall Incorporated@piefed.socialEnglish
          01·
          20 days ago

          Search engine placement isn’t that big of a deal as long as you can change the search engine list. If anything as a user you would want this to be leveraged to provide stability for something as critical as a browser as it doesn’t undermine privacy or user flexibility (it can lead to undesirable incentives as with Mozilla, but that’s the true of almost everything that concerns money).

          I have a heavily customized Firefox, so I may have missed new developments in the baseline profile (I see none of the things you mention on Windows and Android), but how are search suggestions ad?

          Wouldn’t this feature depend on which search script you are using? And isn’t the search suggestion logic for paid placement search engines still explicitly tied to their search systems? Can you explain how this works in terms of specifics?

          Or are you saying that one of the default paid placement search engines places an ad on the first row of the search suggestion list?

          I was curious about the weather widget (as I said, I often miss certain baseline profile features), I actually thought they decided to add a Android widget for weather which seemed strange. Are you sure this is an ad? It may well be, I’ve never seen it or used it, but a quick search suggests this isn’t true. Happy to be corrected.

          Mozilla has a lot of issues, but I don’t think it is helpful to muddy the water in this way.

          • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            19 days ago

            If you actually believe defaults don’t matter as long as you can change them, then you should be super positive about this Waterfox improvement. This feature is the thing Mozilla ignored for years.

            Mozilla opened a forum for community members to suggest changes. Members suggested Startpage as a search engine. Mozilla ignored them. Instead, Mozilla added Ecosia, a paying sponsor, as a search engine. I don’t know how much more blatant a faux nonprofit can get.

            As a response to some other things… Yes, the Weather widget is sponsored, an advertisement placed in your browser at the behest of a paying company. If you hover your mouse over it, it will tell us you it was sponsored by a third party. Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.

            • Rekall Incorporated@piefed.socialEnglish
              01·
              19 days ago

              I outlined my thoughts around Waterfox’s decision to work with StartPage and whitelist their adds further down in this thread. I don’t see an issue with this.

              You keep making bombastic statements, but when anyone calls you out and asks for specifics, you either ignore or try and change the subject.

              How do search suggestions in Firefox integrate advertising? Is it tied to a specific search script and what is advertisement display logic?

              The on-hover provider sponsorship notice is indeed an ad. That’s fair. Definitely not an example of “Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.” and you know it.

              As I said in another post, Mozilla has massive issues, there is no question about that. But you clearly have some sort of weird agenda and have no qualms with being deceptive and promoting misinformation.

              I am done here.

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
    0·
    20 days ago

    The blocker runs in the main browser process rather than as a web extension, which means it isn’t subject to the limitations that extension based blockers like uBlock Origin face.

    Waterfox is a fork of Firefox though, why would it face the limitations that chrome has?

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
      0·
      20 days ago

      Adding to what others said:

      Mobile browsers are very performance sensitive, compared to desktop. Adblocking extensions (in my experience) slurp battery, but native implementations use much less, hence other mobile-focused browsers (like Orion and Cromite) already tend to use native adblockers.

      But it probably doesn’t matter as much on desktop.

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        Using Firefox over Brave gives me 25% less performance on my desktop according to this benchmark site, and that’s with an ad blocker on Brave and none on FF.

        Firefox needs every CPU cycle it can get.

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
          1·
          20 days ago

          Take the benchmarks with a grain of salt.

          …And even then, performance differences like that can feel trivial on modern desktops.

          But yes. Even in some real world situations of mine (like text boxes with 50K+ words), I find FF extensions really bog it down.