Waterfox joins data mining company System1, owners of Startpage

https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/

Side note, this is like when FurAffinity got acquired by IMVU. A privacy centric browser now being funded by a data mining company… Surely nothing can go wrong there…

Also, all other Chromium based browsers don’t fare any better, because Google dictates the Manifest standard and that can change at any time.

This is officially your moment to give up XUL and NPAPI extensions, because the last choice is gone.

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Why? there is still Basilisk browser.

But yeah also waterfox has fallen for the big bag full of cash indeed.

IceCat is still out there

I like muh vivaldi. If yoi can’t fdgure out how to scarf metadata out and not send anything you’re doing it wrong.

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Meh, it’s also an outdated Firefox without Firefox branding.

Well, I don’t know if it’s FUD, but it’s supposed to be a “unstable development browser” according to some sites that want to push for “Firefox Quantum is simply better.”

Also they don’t offer macOS builds at all.

Wow, how all browsers just suck now…
Customization going to hell, privacy nightmares everywhere, usefull API removal and uselss and unstable API intgration… great…

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I know right? Chrome/Chromium is bad because of the unpredictable Manifest changes, Gecko is WebExtensions or bust (and no guarantee of privacy) and Safari went nuclear on browser extensions.

Chromium can be great, if nobody dictated the browser standards. Manifest is literally Google’s dictatorship on open standards.

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Waterfox “classic” is that, but the “current” version is fork that tracks upstream Firefox.

Although I agree that this overall sucks.

I was referring to GNU IceCat in the reply I was making. And that is definitely outdated.

Ah, got it.

There are versions new enough to be based on quantum. The GNU official mirror has up to 60 ESR, and Fedora is up to date against firefox with version 68.
https://src.fedoraproject.org/lookaside/pkgs/icecat/

Huh, so on Fedora it’s actually up to date with the actual ESR releases. The more you know.

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Because most people don’t care about customization, privacy, API’s, etc. They just want something that works. Hell, most people I know don’t care about extensions and can’t even be bothered to change their default search engine.

Anyone I’ve tried to talk to about privacy IRL is just like meh Google and Facebook are already tied into everything so it doesn’t really matter. Even most of the people in the IT department that I work in are aware of the spying but don’t seem to care.

The Alexa wiretap meme is sadly totally true.

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Yeah, the teeth and grin of many IT people doing corporate migration to Windows 10 is unavoidable. They basically had to stop caring to finish their work.

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