It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was re…
After about a year with the browser, I’ll cheerlead it in every thread about Mozilla Corp getting in bed with another ad company or pushing anti-features “that you can toggle off so it’s fine!” into the browser. All the benefits of Firefox as a platform and code base, with no corporation that could profit from you in any way involved. No mandatory ToS, no account, no nothin’. Just a tool for browsing the web, with the full ecosystem of extensions made for Firefox.
I see this take a lot, usually revolving around “doing your part” to keep that tiny sliver of Firefox usage up in siteside metrics. Decide what’s right for your case, but know that Waterfox and Firefox broadcast the same browser user agent so using WF doesn’t take away “market share” from FF. The only thing using FF instead of WF does to “support firefox” is giving Mozilla Corp your data to “not sell, california just calls it selling” and your clicks on its built-in ads - if you’re turning all that stuff off by hand it’s the same as running WF.
After about a year with the browser, I’ll cheerlead it in every thread about Mozilla Corp getting in bed with another ad company or pushing anti-features “that you can toggle off so it’s fine!” into the browser. All the benefits of Firefox as a platform and code base, with no corporation that could profit from you in any way involved. No mandatory ToS, no account, no nothin’. Just a tool for browsing the web, with the full ecosystem of extensions made for Firefox.
I myself will stick to stock Firefox until a credible alternative to Mozilla’s development work on Gecko arises (emphasis on the “work”).
I see this take a lot, usually revolving around “doing your part” to keep that tiny sliver of Firefox usage up in siteside metrics. Decide what’s right for your case, but know that Waterfox and Firefox broadcast the same browser user agent so using WF doesn’t take away “market share” from FF. The only thing using FF instead of WF does to “support firefox” is giving Mozilla Corp your data to “not sell, california just calls it selling” and your clicks on its built-in ads - if you’re turning all that stuff off by hand it’s the same as running WF.