I used Waterfox (which turned into Waterfox Classic) for a few years after the release of Firefox Quantum, but as its internal feature set was frozen at the Firefox 56 level, I began to have issues with it not working with some sites, so I reluctantly went back to Firefox proper.
Fortunately, I’d discovered modifications to userChrome.css by Aris, the author of Custom Theme Restorer. In its never-ending goal to be Chrome, Mozilla had removed features from Firefox that many of us consider essential, and Custom Theme Restorer let us have them back. Of course, when the next thing that was lopped off of Firefox was the ability to use Firefox addons like CTR, that didn’t work anymore. The weaker Chrome-style addons that (poorly) replaced the Firefox-type XUL/XPCOM addons couldn’t put back what Mozilla had removed. Fortunately, the custom CSS duplicates enough of the functionality of CTR to make Firefox look and behave much as I want it to.
I haven’t paid much attention to Waterfox since I moved on from Waterfox Classic. Classic is not the only Waterfox… there’s also Waterfox Current and Waterfox G3.
I just took another look at the newest Waterfox, which is G3, and discovered that they’d implemented the much-requested option to put the tab bar between the content and the URL bar. Even Vivaldi (which is meant to be a highly configurable browser that has every conceivable option) doesn’t have that, even though it’s been requested for a few years by now. I was able to do it with a custom stylesheet (same idea as userChrome.css), but having it available from the settings menu is far better.
As if that wasn’t enough, they’ve also put the option to have a status bar back in. As with the original status bar and the one that the Classic addon Status-4-Evar added back in, it is possible to move the addon icons to the new status bar. Vivaldi also has an optional status bar, but it’s not possible to put the addon icons in it. As with Vivaldi’s status bar, the new Waterfox one has a page zoom control on the right side, though there’s no option to remove it that I was able to find. Fortunately, a little bit of custom css in userChrome.css is able to get rid of it. I’ve had the page zoom controls between the URL box and the search box since forever ago, and that made the one in the status bar redundant.
This is a really promising direction for Waterfox. If they add back all of the things Mozilla removed, it won’t even matter that the classic addons don’t work anymore. The main reason I ever needed them in the first place was to fix what Mozilla had done to Firefox! As long as I could revert the UI changes Mozilla made with each successive release, I didn’t mind too much that they’d made them.
I wonder if Waterfox devs would be willing to add back the unread tab status and the option to not fire the select-all action when the URL bar is focused, two other things Mozilla recently ripped out that have made it a much worse product than it was before in the way I use it. Vivaldi has both of these options natively, by contrast (unlike Chromium, the base for Vivaldi), and in Firefox, I’ve spackled over the hole Mozilla left where the unread tab status used to be with an addon. It’s not as good as the real thing… it only simulates having an unread tab state (which means that restored tabs don’t retain their previously unread state), while Vivaldi seems to have the real thing.
With Firefox, addons are unfortunately not able to change the behavior of the URL bar when it is clicked anymore. The classic addons could have, but not the current Webextensions. Clicking the URL bar always selects all now, which makes it behave differently than everything else in my OS (KDE Plasma on Linux), which is kind of ironic given that the Mozilla excuse for doing this was to make it behave the same as every OS. That’s just something I’ve had to put up with in Firefox, which is a real annoyance given that even when I used Windows, I’d had Firefox set to not select all on click. If I click on the URL itself, it’s because I want the cursor in the precise spot I have clicked so that I can insert or delete part of the URL… I don’t want to replace the entire thing with whatever I am about to type. I’m very much in the habit of pressing CTRL-A for select-all before typing anything if I want to get rid of it, since that’s how everything else works in KDE. I’d like to have my browser work the same as the rest of it, like it did before they decided to make it work the same by making it not work the same.
My personal ox has been gored numerous times in the years that Mozilla has been pursuing Chrome. For every one that I’ve personally noticed, I’d guess there are several that I haven’t.
If you prefer the classic tab-bar under the URL bar appearance or the status bar, Waterfox G3 or Current may be worth a look.
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