Bye bye Firefox, hello Waterfox

Phil2008 · 16 Dec 2017 at 01:30

I must have been using good old Firefox for over 10yrs, but have been forced to change to Waterfox so I can continue using my extensions. Waterfox seem to be quite good so far, its faster and I cannot tell any difference between the 2 browsers.

Wonder how many other people has knocked Firefox on the head because of this?

Fishbait · 16 Dec 2017 at 18:04

Used Waterfox for a short time quite a while ago, it's okay.
Been using Palemoon (another FF fork) for few years now, it's good. Although they did remove the SDK thing for some bizarre reason, but worth checking out.

Most of my addons worked, found some others to replace the few that didn't & actually improved some doing that

Blackjack Davy · 16 Dec 2017 at 19:28

Been using it too it got the latest updates too that I think were otherwise Quantum only? The only issue is I can't get unMHT addon working on it. Otherwise its been fine.

Orcvader · 17 Dec 2017 at 10:46

I used Waterfox before the 64 bit version of Firefox arrived, but I had some memory leak issues and moved back to the official build. Although this was years ago.

I see WF is on v56.0.1, but looking at this, it seems he will try port legacy addons support to newer versions of FF, wonder how that will play with Quantum?

linktoinsanity · 21 Dec 2017 at 08:22

I have used Waterfox for years, however in the last year I have started moving over to Chrome as my main browser. I use Waterfox and IE as my secondary browsers.

vuzzaon · 21 Dec 2017 at 08:35

WaterFox is the developer edition of FireFox?

Orcvader · 21 Dec 2017 at 18:52

vuzzaon said:
WaterFox is the developer edition of FireFox?

No, it's a different version compiled by a different developer from the same source code. Originally, it was aimed at creating a 64-bit version of Firefox, using compilers that took advantage of instruction sets on newer CPUs. Now that FF itself has become 64-bit as well as more modern, WF now aims to remove all telemetry stuff and uneeded features (eg Pocket, sponsered tiles). You can see here for what it offers over FF: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/#develop

The main issue now though is due to trying to keep legacy addon support, it will for a couple of years be stuck on the FF 56 base, so it will be very interesting on what the developer will for future versions.