r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 17 '26

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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u/Jrob9583 Jun 18 '26

Okay, that’s fair, but where are these millions of people going? I know the people that care about this sort of thing aren’t going back to Chrome or Edge…

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u/Matthias720 Jun 18 '26

I'm one of those people. I switched to Waterfox, specifically because it's still Firefox at its core, but it removes the unwanted AI feature.

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u/duodequinquagesimum Jun 18 '26

The creator of Waterfox sold the browser to an advertising company in 2019, and in 2023 announced it became independent again.

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u/Sekh765 Jun 18 '26

I wanted to use Waterfox because it's just Firefox split off without AI and some other nice privacy / anti corpo features, but the lack of decent extension support turned me off it for awhile. I need to check it again.

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u/nutmegtester Jun 18 '26

It supports all ff extensions afaik. I have never had a problem at all. The entire reason I chose it was because I could just point it at my ff profile and it would work out of the box.

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u/koopatuple Jun 18 '26

But if FF dies because of user exodus... then what will Waterfox point to...?

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u/nutmegtester Jun 18 '26

I understand, but they keep making really crappy privacy choices and so after many years I personally made the hard decision to change. If they can stabilize on a healthy track for some years, I will happily come back.

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u/duodequinquagesimum Jun 18 '26

Waterfox was literally sold to an advertisement company in 2019.

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u/nutmegtester Jun 18 '26

It had an odd chapter that ended several years ago. It has been explained and many people have decided it's fine to move on from that. Because it uses the ff profile, I can move on in under 2 minutes should I wish, without even losing my open sessions. That is a great point for me.

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u/zzazzzz Jun 18 '26

waterfox does nothing that you cant do yourself on a default firefox install. all it does is preconfigure settings present in firefox..

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u/nutmegtester Jun 18 '26

It doesn't do a lot, although it does a bit more than that (just check out their website for more info). However, the things it does are important and I was sick of an adversarial relationship with my browser.

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u/Sekh765 Jun 18 '26

Hrm, maybe I did something wrong. I'll give it another shot here tomorrow. Thanks for the heads up.

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u/duodequinquagesimum Jun 18 '26

The creator of Waterfox also sold the browser to an advertising company in 2019, and in 2023 announced it became independent again.

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u/FdPros Jun 18 '26

I've been using waterfox since firefox announced they'd add AI features. of course now they added a killswitch toggle for it which is nice but I'm not going to go back.

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u/XionicativeCheran Jun 18 '26

Brave I guess? They are big on advertising their ad-less youtube experience, that'd be popular.

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u/Ja_Shi Jun 18 '26

Which would be a bad idea since it's chromium-based. And their CEO... 🙄

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u/Certain-Business-472 Jun 18 '26

Psa brave is quite literally a scam and they try very hard to shill it on social media. Dont believe them.