Waterfox

★★★★☆

A Firefox fork aimed at improved performance and privacy, without sacrificing usability to the extent that LibreWolf does. Follows the extended support releases, so it can be little behind on features while still up to date on bug fixes. Similar concept to Ungoogled Chromium, but Waterfox is a complete application instead of leaving gaps in functionality.

Using it is about the same as using Firefox, except that it doesn’t phone home or try to load a full screen of Pocket recommendations. I haven’t run into any broken sites like I have with LibreWolf (which disables features like WebGL as part of its security hardening). I also like their implementation of vertical tabs with thumbnails better than the tabs on Arc or Zen (or Firefox 136, for that matter), though when I open multiple tabs on the same site, sometimes it’s hard to tell at a glance which one I have open.

As with LibreWolf, some documentation seems to be missing, with settings or notices linking to pages that should have been copied over, or describing things (like installing through the system package manager on Linux) that only apply to upstream Firefox. (It’s also worth considering your threat model and the fact that small projects still depend on Mozilla for finding and fixing vulnerabilities.)

Sync and Extensions

Waterfox is compatible with all Firefox Add-ons, and can sync settings and bookmarks through Firefox Sync (which is encrypted). I already use Floccus (which lets you bring your own storage) to sync bookmarks with other browsers (including Chromium ones), and it works just fine on here.

KeePassXC-Browser needs you to copy or symlink the Native Messaging directory to connect to the password manager. I’ve gotten it to work on macOS with nothing more than just linking that folder and restarting KeePassXC. But I still haven’t managed to get it to work through Flatpak on Linux.

Mobile

Unlike LibreWolf, Waterfox is also available on Android! (It’s in the Google Play store.) The mobile version is basically the same as mobile Firefox as far as using it goes, minus data collection. Also minus in-browser translations for some reason. IronFox has them, but WaterFox doesn’t.

Availability

Normal installers are offered for Windows and macOS, with auto-updates. There’s a Flatpak and a binary tarball for Linux. The macOS version runs natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon hardware. The Windows version is currently x86_64 only, but seems to run fine on Arm64 using Windows 11’s emulation. The Linux version is also x86_64-only, at least for now.