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by melenaos 1722 days ago
By reading the subtitle 'a perfect ballance between privacy and usability' i think that it wont have privacy and might be less user friendly that other browsers.

Also, the statement that you try to collect less data doesn't says anything about privacy.

1 comments

I've used a recent version of WF yesteryear on Mac and Windows, both with the firewall installed and guess what. The Firewall started notifying numerous outgoing connection attempts even before I opened any webpage! WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers. But that's not the end of the story. I've installed the classic version of WF so that it would run on my older Mac. What could be worse than an unashamed privacy infringement? WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD. Luckily for me the SSD survived the hard off but one thing is proven for sure: WF is to be avoided at all costs.
Unfortunately with the way Gecko is structured, the browser requires a lot of connections to the Firefox Remote Settings Server, for:

* OpenH264 Codec for H264 playback

* Widevine (if you enable DRM, it's disabled by default on Waterfox)

* Extension blocklists

* Phishing/malware website blocklists

* Certificate downloads and HSTS Preload Lists

* Captive portal detection

* And a few other security related bits and bobs I can't remember off the top of my head.

I did try to migrate to offline dumps so these things would only get updated at browser update time, but it causes a few issues with the browser doing so.

> WF was obstinately trying to record each and every info about me into a network of servers.

That would be rather shocking to me if it's true - the browser should be making requests to download things, but not upload anything? If this isn't the case do let me know what is going where as that is most definitely not by design!

> WF Classic froze the whole operating system, the keyboard went unresponsive so I had to do a hard shutdown! You know each hard power off could destroy the SSD.

That is definitely not ideal, but unfortunately Classic is very long in the tooth now and compatibility is getting harder with each release.

Sorry you had those issues though, definitely not what we want happening.