I understand why Mozilla have started implementing these features, it seems to have more mass market appeal than not - look at how popular “AI” powered browsers have become.
But boy does it not add extra effort removing these features every time there’s a new roll-out and it’s not done the best way IMO.
I feel as if these features would go down better if Mozilla actually notified the user that they’re available and then offered whether to enable them or not (could have them enabled by default for new users). That way you’re still giving a choice, but in a more respectful manner.
If anyone is interested I’ve gutted all the more obscene stuff out of Waterfox and have instead left the useful ones such a ML translation, which is opt-in.
Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours. Feels like you somehow have to intuitively know how something works (unlikely) or do a web search on how to use everything instead of having it shown to you nicely.
> Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours.
Yes, please! We use Google's online office programs at work and every time it has so far popped up a notification about a new feature I immediately dismissed it by the act of actually doing the work I opened the tab to do. Then I have no idea how to find out what that feature was again, as the popup notification was dismissed.
I'm torn because I probably do want to know what new, relevant features are, but I opened the app for a reason, so I want the tour to get out of my way so I can do my work.
What you are saying is right, but Mozilla looks to be abusing their users. The appropriate thing to do, if they were concerned about looking more honest and showing they care about user's privacy, would be to have the features listed in settings and allow them to be turned off. However, that's not what they are doing.
I've also noticed that new versions not only can sneak in new features, but reverse or conflict with previous changes users made in config. The sad thing is how limited the options people have to avoid the abuse.
So true about onboarding. The trend towards trying to make all interfaces simple and immediately accessible has led to lots of functionality being deeply hidden. Of course you don't want the interface to be insanely complicated but you also don't want to make it so simple it's limiting.
Sort of related, after reading this I went and checked the Waterfox reddit and saw some people complaining about recent changes. I agree with a person there that one of the most important things is not changing. One of the reasons I use Waterfox is to not be subject to the caprices of Mozilla. I just want the same interface I've been using since back in the days of like Firefox 4.0. If there are changes, they can be introduced in an opt-in, reversible way as you suggest. But the default assumption should be "don't break users' workflows by changing behavior".
I appreciate all you do with Waterfox! I've been using it for years now.
"…it seems to have more mass market appeal than not…"
Perhaps so, but Mozilla has a long history of shooting itself in the foot by repeatedly making ill-considered decisions that annoy users (and add-on developers) which have driven them away. Many problems were clearly avoidable, and with Google's juggernaut Chrome towering over Firefox, Mozilla's most important decision should have been to focus on keeping its user base intact at all costs. Clearly, that didn't happen.
Instead, Mozilla plowed on making changes to Firefox with seemingly little consideration of the impact they'd have on users. And Mozilla's still at it. Everyone makes mistakes and one should be forgiven for making them but it's hard to feel sorry for Mozilla given it's made so many and repeated them so often. The article says Firefox has 2.17% of the browser market, my response is if it were not for the doggedness of a small percentage of users who value not being locked into Google's and Microsoft's ecosystems Firefox would have died at least half a decade or go.
It's not possible here to provide a comprehensive survey of these mistakes and annoyances so I'll mention just a few of my pet peeves (there are many more). First, I'll preface this by saying that for most users a web browser ranks amongst their most important utilities, it should be a 'transparent' interface between them and the web, and it should function without hindering users and be malleable to suit users' needs. Unfortunately, that's so often not the case, and Firefox is not alone in not fulfilling that purpose. OK, let's start:
• Annoyingly, just about every major version of Firefox comes with changes that affect its operation. Often they introduce time-wasting and usability gotchas that are more impositions than feature improvements. For example, the Australis UI, for me it put constraints on how I could configure the UI (toolbars were more restricting and less flexible—e.g. the default spacing between icons had been increased limiting their maximum number).
• I had no objection to the Australis UI per se except that Mozilla made its use compulsory. Why didn't Mozilla provide a simple fallback option to the previous UI to protect compatibility?
(It's 40-plus years since the PC revolution, so you'd think by now developers would at least know that when they alter a UI, they force millions of users around the world to lose millions of manhours futzing around and relearning everything/developing new muscle memory and so on.
In many instances these changes are unnecessary. Moreover, users find having to adapt to them damned annoying!)
• Mozilla also applied the same UI nonsense to options/preferences, the original interface (as still used by say the Palemoon fork) wasn't perfect but it's replacement was worse, its large font forced it to dribble over to the next screen and finding options wasn't as clear. It is now easy to lose focus—one can miss seeing say the About:config option even when looking for it. Improving the earlier interface would have been preferable (just think of the amount of time developers lost redeveloping that work—work that wasn't really necessary).
• Another UI annoyance is the new minimalist look, hiding toolbars and like. More development wasted on a feature that only reduced usability. Right, it's another instance of ergonomics bedamned, again, we've more user time unnecessarily wasted looking for menu items/options not to mention time taken up by add-on developers who've had the job of rectifying the Mozilla-induced problem.
• FIREFOX'S BIGGEST AND MOST LONGSTANDING PROBLEM—BROKEN ADD-ONs AND PLUGINS. Almost every new version of Firefox has broken them. It was so fucking annoying that years ago I switched to the Palemoon fork for my default browser on both Windows and Linux; it was the only way I could achieve operational stability. And I'm just a user, many add-on developers left the Firefox platform as Mozilla's changes forced them to redo work that had been completed previously.
It's been a nightmare, Mozilla kept offering excuses, new software paradigms, security reasons and so on but as a user it disrupted my workflow to the point where I gave up. The other issue was that important add-ons upon which I depended were no longer being developed for the same reasons. Why didn't Mozilla take a leaf out of MS's Windows development where backward comparability was absolutely paramount? Anyone at Mozilla reading this will be screaming security issues and such, but why didn't you offfer those in the know with at least a fallback position?
• Mozilla invented a very useful webpage format called Mozilla Archive Format, MAFF (.maff), which allowed a webpage to be saved as a single file as opposed to the traditional way of saving HTML and ancillary files separately (as per MS Windows etc.), however it is not available in Firefox, nor is the MHTML/MIME (.maf) format which is the other way of saving a webpage to a single file (as used by IE for years).
Why fucking not, as it's so damn usefull? Moreover, MAFF is so simple, it's just a zip file in disguise, unzip it and one ends up with a HTML file and a separate directory for the other files which can then be viewed by any browser. Moreover, MAFF was simpler than the MIME format and was particularly useful in the days when IE saved nonstandard HTML in its .mht files. For years, there was a MAFF plugin for Firefox but its developer gave up because Mozilla kept changing the requirements for add-ons. In the absence of an absolute necessity, such action is suicide for a program.
We are a quarter-century into the 21st Century and Firefox is 21 years old so why is Firefox still so devoid of many basic web necessities/features—ones that ought to have been fully integrated into the base product thus avoiding the need for add-ons (the same also applies to Thunderbird). It's long been such a puzzling question.
Again, I use the Palemoon (PM) fork to avoid Firefox's limitations especially its failure to integrate Mozilla's own MAFF format. Importantly for me PM still has a MAFF add-on. (On Android, I use Privacy Browser (PB) because it fully integrates the MIME/.mht webpage save facility within the body of the program, moreover, it's one of the best implementations I've used.)
• Mozilla's dictatorial authoritarian attitude and JS. I spend much of my web browsing time doing so with JavaScript disabled as webpage rendering is just so much faster, also ads and pop-ups disappear and much website spying is nuked. Firefox used to include an option to disable JavaScript but Mozilla killed it off without warning. Why? Such bloodymindedness makes me want to send Firefox's developers off to the stocks for necessary 'reeducation'. The fucking hide of them—we do need Mozilla whistleblowers to leak why the organization acts in such an autocratic manner.
Right, such dysfunctional decisions simply mean that I am unable to use Firefox even if I wanted to (and again it's PM and PB that have come to the rescue).
• Mozilla markets Firefox as a having good privacy credentials yet it's always been overly secretive about Firefox's telemetry—its defaults, how users should go about disabling its various aspects, etc. This double standard doesn't fit well with many users, myself included.
• Moreover, on that last point, Mozilla often wants users to provide feedback on various aspects of Firefox but it has a longstanding policy—which it never offers any satisfactory explanation about—of not saying why certain decisions about the program were or weren't made—why certain features were or weren't included and so on—just as we're now witnessing again with these new AI features. In short, that Mozilla is not open with its users breeds mistrust.
• There are many other problems with Firefox (such as with printing) that I cannot address here but from what I've said it's clear that in the light of the Chrome onslaught Mozilla failed to carve out a nitch for itself in places not filled by Chrome (why it's so is most curious, perhaps it's pressure from Google threatening less funding if Mozilla doesn't tow the line).
Whatever the reason, Mozilla over many years not only failed to grasp the significance of having the tech-savvy and those with special requirements amongst its loyal Firefox users but it often invoked hostile policies that alienated them. Mozilla could have easily integrated important features for technical users and still kept Firefox simple for neophytes and beginners but it failed to do so. The penalty has been harsh, Firefox nowadays is almost an irrelevancy.
Perhaps someday we'll learn reasons why Mozilla both alienated its niche market of tech-savvy users as well as throwing away an excellent opportunity to foster and encourage privacy-minded users who would have much preferred not to use Chrome or Edge.
Just an FYI for anyone who is interested, I’ve also been doing the same for Waterfox.
Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
What else does Waterfox remove? Does it still support signining in with a Mozilla account to enable sync features? Would be nice to see a comprehensive list somewhere; I couldn't see anything on the Waterfox homepage or the GitHub README.
You can see here[1], I'll avoid pasting again. But yes, can still use a Mozilla account and the website is getting a refurb - I will add a third hard thing in computer science.. letting people know all the things you've actually built :')
I think it would help to put some of this on your site. When I land on the main waterfox page it looks like just firefox but reskinned. I'm not saying that's what it actually is (clearly it isn't) but it can help having some clarity about this. I mean it isn't like you're being shy about building off of firefox, so why not mention it?
Thanks for maintaining Waterfox. For me it has been working without issues, basically Firefox but with reasonable defaults, and I don’t have to constantly look for and manually disable “features” like these.
Not sure why it took so long for Mozilla to expose the setting on Android, it's been a 'secret' setting for a long time. In fact, sometimes they let features ride the rails for a little bit too long IMO.
For Waterfox for Android I exposed the setting by default and also added an addition DNS over Oblivious HTTP setting (DoOH) which uses Fastly as the relay (they host and control it, for privacy sanitisation) and Cloudflare as the resolver.
But more importantly, there's a system wide DoH setting in Android (or at least in GrapheneOS). I don't see why it would preferable to only configure DoH in the browser.
In theory could be as low as single digit ms overhead, assuming fastly and cloudflares PoPs being used are very close to each other. In reality it seems higher than that but I'm sure a lot of optimisations can be done.
While this was measured in a slightly different implementation via Oblivious DNS[1]:
> The first thing that we can say with confidence is that the additional encryption is marginal. We know this because we randomly selected 10,000 domains from the Tranco million dataset and measured both encryption of the A record with a different public key, as well as its decryption. The additional cost between a proxied DoH query/response and its ODoH counterpart is consistently less than 1ms at the 99th percentile.
When I rebased all of Waterfox’s changes onto the latest ESR branch, disabling AI features was my top priority. I only kept translations, and even that’s opt-in. I think most Firefox features, especially anything AI-related, should be opt-in by default. This feels like part of a broader shift in software expectations - when applications start acting autonomously, users should know exactly what’s happening and explicitly consent to that behavior.
That figure from GPT-5 seems to be slightly off, according to the Irish Times:
“At least 258 Irish-born soldiers have won the Medal of Honor since its inception. Of those, 148 won them during the civil war – 14 in one day when the Union Navy raided the Confederate port of Mobile, Alabama, in 1864.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20250504103715/https://www.irish...
I use one of them, ice-cat, with privacy badger and jslibre and I have tor installed as well as chrome, Firefox, libre wolf, dillo, w3m, Mullvad, links, eww and others because I make oldschool websites. The real no telemetry browser is of course lynx.
As it currently stands there should be over a billion devices that natively support JPEG-XL, as it was introduced in all Apple OSs since September 2023[1].
On the web alone it should be close to a billion users with support for JXL due to Safari’s market share.
It's also supported in Windows, GNOME, KDE, pretty much all image editors/viewers, and pretty much every other relevant program except for chromium based browsers.
Not just Chromium-based browsers, Firefox as well. Might not make much of a difference for user counts but it does mean that so far it's available on the web is limited to a single vendor.
It's worth noting that it is "supported" in Firefox however it's not enabled at compile time for release builds (but is enabled for nightly and testing/validation builds).
Full release/production support will come when the (more or less drop in replacement) rust rewrite of libjxl is production ready.
Firefox has it implemented (behind a preference on nightly). They just don't want to ship it if Chromium isn't going to because it would cause fragmentation in the web and something they have to maintain forever for a minority of sites (as most won't bother if Chromium based browsers don't support it).
Tbh it's less about having to maintain it forever and more about not wanting to deal with maintaining a C++ library codebase that would widen the potential attack surface of the browser (due to memory bugs, etc). They are fine adopting it as long as it's in rust (which is being worked on, see sibling comments)
The Mozilla "organizations" are a two-headed grift piggy-backed on a non-profit shell so the IRS keeps smiling.
Firefox hasn't made a technical decision without first forwarding the minutes to Mountain View and Redmond since roughly 2017.
Every nine-figure Google wire lands promptly converts into $450 k-per-head salary vapor and off-site "all-hands," while the same week another 250 actual engineers get an email that begins: "You're talented and valued BUT-."
Servo? Jettisoned.
MDN? Gutted.
Security teams? Re-org'd into a Slack channel no one reads.
And the Foundation helpfully reminds donors:
"Your gifts don't pay for Firefox engineering."
No kidding. They pay for glossy pamphlets proclaiming the open-web gospel, first-class flights to "advocacy summits," and Mitchell Baker's $2.5 million thank-you note. Firefox isn't a browser; it's a loss-leader Google keeps in the closet for the next antitrust subpoena.
So does Chrome if you check out the right commits and enable it.
But if you go getfirefox.com, click "Download Firefox" then there will be no JXL support not even behind any configuration flags. So no, it doesn't support it. There are also no plans to enable support with the current implementation.
I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.
They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.
It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
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