Waterfox – No Telemetry

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I’m posting this because its new to me, and thought there might be others that regard telemetry as a no-no. I assume more savvy users are already aware.

I was having an issue with my current version of Firefox, and frankly, I’ve been less than happy about some of the changes. It seems very slow. So in seeking an alternative, I’ve installed Waterfox 53.0.1 (64-bit). I have a windows7 x64 machine.

I like it. It seems faster, and as the Waterfox site states,

Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)

 

Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)

 

Removed Pocket

 

Removed Telemetry

 

Removed data collection

 

Removed startup profiling

 

Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins

 

Allow running of unsigned extensions

 

Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page

 

Addition of Duplicate Tab option

Here’s the link – waterfox 53.0.1 

Has anyone else been using it? What do you think?

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Thank you. I used it a long time ago, it is good to see he is still kept up this project. There are times when a duplicate tab would do quite nicely, Mozilla missed adding that essential feature.

I may try it again seeing he has removed the bloat and feature creep features, however allowing unsigned add-ons and all NPAPI plugins may not be a good idea.

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Allow running of unsigned extensions

While some of the listed differences seem good, not requiring signatures on extensions doesn’t sound like a very good idea from a security perspective. What means are you using to ensure extensions you add are legitimate?

-Noel

1 user thanked author for this post.

Rick R

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Noel, thanks for asking. As it stands, I created a copy of my Firefox profile with extensions that had already been installed. I have pretty much all I need so don’t expect to add more. However, I think what is probably safe (you might know better) is to use Firefox to install and test extensions, and subsequently add them to Waterfox if they’re useful. I’m not savvy enough to know all the implication of unsigned, but it does sound like it offers opportunity to try unique extensions, but I expect that comes with a risk. I suppose I’ll need to be cautious and do my homework before I decide to install any.

If you have recommendations I’m all ears. And thanks for the feedback.

 

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Sounds like a good idea to vet extensions in Firefox first.

Code signing is just a way to both verify the identity of an author and to ensure the code hasn’t been changed since it was originally packaged. It’s not an iron-clad guarantee of quality or of legitimacy, but it improves the odds some. Windows verifies certificates online so if a bad actor were to get a code signing certificate and their software was detected to be malicious, we can hope that it would lose its “trusted” status with the certification authorities Windows contacts.

-Noel

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Aside from yet another trip down memory lane, there is actually some stuff in here that matters, like why you may not wish to turn off FF telemetry… but I can’t for the life of me write a short post, so here goes.

I am myself migrating to Pale Moon (again).  Back when there was no official Windows Firefox x86/64, I tried Pale Moon 64-bit first.  I used it for a while, but when PM decided to start identifying using a different UUID than Firefox for addons, it broke a few of my addons that I was not about to give up so easily, so I tried WF.

WF was great… it worked, it was quick, it didn’t crash all the time like x86 FF (neither did PM, btw), and it worked with my addons.  I used that until the official FF 64-bit builds for Windows finally hit the beta channel (they’d been in alpha for years), and they performed even better than Waterfox.  I also tried Cyberfox, which has a claim to fame of having been compiled with settings specifically for Intel or AMD CPUs, but FF beta was better… rock solid, fast, everything working.  It was an early beta that was far, far better than any release Firefox (x86) I’d used for years.

When FF 64 finally arrived for Windows, I kept using it… until about a week ago.  While I had been having horrendous instability since ~FF51, it was the recognition of Mozilla’s commitment to what seems like a suicidal path that finally did it.

I remember when I was using Mozilla Suite (now Seamonkey) and the devs announced an experimental product called Phoenix.  I thought its direct parent, Moz Suite, was quite good, so I was a little puzzled by the name at first, but it referred to the phoenix rising from the ashes of Netscape, which was still around at the time, but only a sad shadow of its former self (a division of AOL whose only purpose later turned out to be a means to leverage Microsoft into royalty-free licensing of IE to be used as part of their AOL software).

Phoenix started as the browser of the suite with “bloat” being hacked off in large chunks.  The core of Phoenix was to be a light, nimble core of mainstream features nearly everyone wanted, with the more esoteric stuff being pushed out into addons.  As such, Phoenix could be as light and small or heavy and feature-rich as you wanted… whatever you wanted a browser to be, Phoenix could do it.  While the suite had extensions too, one thing it could not credibly do was light and small; by the standards of the day, it was a heavyweight.

Eventually, Phoenix BIOS complained about the name, so it became Firebird (because a phoenix is, quite literally, a fire bird).  Combined with the email client Thunderbird and the Mac Cocoa native Camino, Mozilla’s new offerings it looked like it could double as a used car lot.

It wasn’t Pontiac that complained about Firebird.  Apparently, they thought that a car and a browser would probably not be confused for one another.  The complaint came from the company that still held a trademark on some database software, if I recall… and so Firebird became Firefox.

For years, the spirit of what Firefox was created to be was evident in the product.  The robust, powerful addons it permitted were always at the core; they were the definitive solution to bloat and “featuritis.”  Devs always want to add more features, as it’s a lot more fun than the backend stuff like standards compliance or certainly the drudgework of debugging.  Addons with Firefox were so powerful that there was no need to add features to the core project; people who wanted them would get them through addons, and those who didn’t would not.

Somewhere along the line, though, it seems that Mozilla began to lose the plot.  Chrome had come along, and it had stolen Firefox’s thunder as the standards-compliant alternative to Microsoft.  Mozilla, the non-profit created to oppose the corporate hegemony of one giant, seemed to be subservient to the new corporate giant.  Resources were scarce, as they are at any non-profit, and a deal with Google to make that FF’s default search provider (ironically, leading users to pages advertising Chrome) may have been a part of why Moz felt they had to step into line.

So many times have I seen FF change something that didn’t need changing, and when I’d search to find out why, I’d find some Moz people saying that was how Chrome does it, as if that was the be-all and the end-all of reasons.  What a change that was since the days of IE6– back then, Mozilla was about making the best browser they knew how.  Now the idea seemed to be that the way to get back the people that switched to Chrome would be to make FF more like Chrome.

It really seemed (and seems) bizarre to me.  Chrome was designed from day one to be a minimalistic browser with little customization ability.  It ticked all the boxes for standards compliance, security, open source (as Chromium anyway), and support for all the latest backend stuff, but it was never about providing the user with the browsing experience he wanted.  In typical Google form, it was about providing the user with the browsing experience Google wanted him to have.

By all reports, it was faster, more responsive, smoother, and more stable than what Firefox had become by then, and when that was combined with Google’s dominance of search (which gave them a platform to advertise Chrome to nearly every internet user in the world at no cost to them), Chrome sucked all the air out of the room when it came to providing an alternative to MS browsers (which had already started to drop in market share, to the benefit of Firefox, when Chrome hit the market in a big way).

What about that suggested that the people who had left for Chrome could be gotten back by making FF’s UI more like Chrome?  Those who wanted the simple Chrome UI already had that, and those who wanted smooth performance and speed still couldn’t get that in Firefox.  It seemed like the only reasons left to stick with FF were the addons (Chrome has them, but they’re nowhere near as powerful as those in FF) and a general dislike/distrust of Google and their snoopiness.

Chrome was designed later than Firefox.  Firefox was born during the single-core era; Chrome was designed for multi-core CPUs.  Chrome was built from the start to have one process per tab, isolating them from each other as well as from the UI process, so that long operations in any of the rendering tabs would not cause the stutters and pauses Firefox had become known for.  Mozilla has been working on retrofitting that into Firefox for a long time; called electrolysis or e10s (cause ten letters are omitted between the e and the s), it’s being rolled out gradually now.

E10s is not up to the standard set by Google yet.  At present, all the rendering is done by one process, with the UI in another (and possibly addons in another, though I am not sure about that).  Retrofitting old code for a new feature like this is rough, rough stuff, and the devs are finding that every time they turn around, they have to break some or other addon API.

As such, they’ve decided to dump the powerful addons and adopt (wait for it…) Chrome addons.  Of course.  They’ll be tweaked a bit to work better with FF, but at their core, they’re Chrome addons.

While I understand the reasons behind the change, I can’t get behind it.  The powerful addons were the raison d’être of Firefox; to throw those away now is throw the baby away with the bathwater… not to mention the diaper table, the crib, the stroller, the playpen, all the baby’s clothes, the mobile hanging from the ceiling… yeah.

If Firefox only has two advantages over Chrome (powerful addons and less concern about spying), and you take away the powerful addons, is what you have left going to be enough?  I seriously doubt it.  It wasn’t enough to keep Google from eating Mozilla’s lunch over the past however many years even with the addons, but Firefox is still hangin’ in there.  But for how long?

Ironically, one of the reasons sometimes cited for this is… telemetry.  Specifically, Mozilla receives telemetry that has somehow given them the impression that powerful addons don’t matter, and neither does robust UI customizability.  Of course, it stands to reason that the more savvy users, those who would use a lot of addons and customize things a lot, will also be the ones to turn off the telemetry… kind of like how Microsoft got the idea that no one cared about the start button anymore during the development of Windows 8.

I actually put the Firefox telemetry back on some time ago, having had it OFF by default (my default, I mean) for years.  I didn’t enable the full setting, just the basic one.  If I am given a choice, I may choose to allow some telemetry to help out the company that makes software I like to use.  Try to tell me I can’t opt out, and I will move mountains to block it, and it doesn’t matter if the data being sent is something I’d be okay with sending in other circumstances.

So, Pale Moon.  It probably won’t ever get e10s.  It’s a question as to whether PM in itself is weighty enough to keep the addon devs engaged with the addons that still work in PM but no longer in FF; a browser that retains a powerful addon API with no addons to make use of it amounts to nothing.  As FF diverges more and more from its single-process roots, the workload to backport security features and new standards compliance with PM will grow too, and it may become a lost cause.

For now, though, it is a breath of fresh air.  I hadn’t realized how many minor changes had been made to FF over the years… things that never made it to Pale Moon.  Thankfully.  The fonts render clearly once again right out of the box, and the Australis UI is nowhere to be seen.  It doesn’t take an addon to have a status bar.  The old-style dropdown list from the URL bar is back… I’ve missed it.

And it hasn’t crashed.  Not once.  Firefox, in its last two versions, crashes if you sneeze in the other room now, and it’s equally unstable on both of my dissimilar PCs… one a core 2 duo laptop, one a Sandy/Cougar desktop.  Both of them do have discrete nVidia GPUs, so there’s that, but previous FF versions were not as bad.

Ironically, it seems like the high water mark in terms of FF stability in Windows 64-bit was that beta I mentioned.  There may have been a period of good releases after that, but they were only as good as the beta, not better. I am not sure when the downturn began, but there began a slow decline in things “just working” in FF… I started getting things like random moments of “not responding” that would resolve themselves shortly, culminating with the latest FF now that just locks up tight with no warning and for no apparent reason (only a few tabs open, memory footprint by no means excessive).  Forcing e10s on or off made no difference.

Pale Moon, however, “just works,” with mostly the same addons I had in Firefox (a few less to undo changes that never were in PM; a few more to add some positive changes Mozilla put in FF since then, and otherwise all of the heavy hitter addons I use and insist upon).  I just wonder if PM is a big enough project to handle being the sole heir to the vast library of Firefox addons (which will presumably be culled from the FF repo too).

Dark, dark times for browser traditionalists would appear to be on the horizon.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

5 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, Rick R, AlanH, Noel Carboni, satrow

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Hm, I haven’t tried FireFox since I switched from ATI to nVidia – I hadn’t thought that would matter and I just don’t have that many occasions to run FireFox…

Wow, just to start it up I saw these sites contacted:

detectportal.firefox.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 23.74.2.115
a1089.d.akamai.net A resolved from Forwarding Server as 23.74.2.88
a1089.d.akamai.net AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
www.prodigitalsoftware.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 66.96.149.32
www.prodigitalsoftware.com A resolved from Cache to 66.96.149.32
www.prodigitalsoftware.com AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
secure.softwarekey.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 66.150.99.39
secure.softwarekey.com A resolved from Cache to 66.150.99.39
secure.softwarekey.com AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
safebrowsing.google.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 216.58.192.110
sb.l.google.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 216.58.192.110
sb.l.google.com AAAA resolved from Forwarding Server as 2607:f8b0:4008:80b::200e
clients1.google.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 216.58.219.174
clients.l.google.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 216.58.219.174
clients.l.google.com AAAA resolved from Forwarding Server as 2607:f8b0:4008:804::200e
safebrowsing-cache.google.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 216.58.219.78
safebrowsing.cache.l.google.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 216.58.219.78
safebrowsing.cache.l.google.com AAAA resolved from Forwarding Server as 2607:f8b0:4008:804::200e
shavar.services.mozilla.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 52.24.49.107
shavar.prod.mozaws.net A resolved from Forwarding Server as 52.35.227.152
shavar.prod.mozaws.net AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
ocsp.digicert.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 72.21.91.29
cs9.wac.phicdn.net A resolved from Forwarding Server as 72.21.91.29
cs9.wac.phicdn.net AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
services.addons.mozilla.org A resolved from Forwarding Server as 35.167.231.223
olympia.prod.mozaws.net A resolved from Forwarding Server as 52.88.190.249
olympia.prod.mozaws.net AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
versioncheck-bg.addons.mozilla.org A resolved from Forwarding Server as 54.148.10.141
aus5.mozilla.org A resolved from Forwarding Server as 54.69.41.35
versioncheck.prod.mozaws.net A resolved from Forwarding Server as 54.148.10.141
balrog-aus5.r53-2.services.mozilla.com A resolved from Forwarding Server as 54.69.29.166
versioncheck.prod.mozaws.net AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
balrog-aus5.r53-2.services.mozilla.com AAAA not found by Forwarding Server
ciscobinary.openh264.org A resolved from Forwarding Server as 204.237.174.17
a19.dscg10.akamai.net A resolved from Forwarding Server as 204.237.174.66
a19.dscg10.akamai.net AAAA resolved from Forwarding Server as 2001:668:108:23::cced:ae42

It didn’t crash, but geez, that’s just ridiculous! The ONLY site my home page actually contacts is prodigitalsoftware.com. It’s no wonder people might think FireFox is slow. Whatever happened to simple browsing where the software just goes and gets the content? Is that considered too dangerous for the masses?

Admittedly I haven’t customized my FireFox configuration. Most or all of those contacts might be disableable through careful tweaking, but it doesn’t quite give a “light / fast out of the box” vibe, does it?

-Noel

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Noel:

Have you tried using a script blocker in FF? I use the NoScript add-on, and your telemetry list is about what I see in the sites that are being blocked by NoScript.

I allow only what is necessary for the site I am visiting. Sometimes I don’t even allow that, depending on what scripts the site is trying to run.

So, speaking from a telemetry perspective, Firefox with NoScript allows the user to see the telemetry which each website is engaged in, and to block most/all of it.

Jim

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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No, I don’t block scripts (nor have I set up anything in Firefox; it’s on the default config). I block the bad stuff a whole different way, via managed blacklisting.

And I want to be clear: That list, above, is coming out of FireFox proper, not because of any scripts running on my home page.

I tried out Pale Moon since writing the above. When I open the browser it contacts the one an only home page site. So I guess you could say it has some of the same attributes as WaterFox, per the subject of this thread.

-Noel

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Wow Ascaris, that’s interesting.

So 1) I haven’t tried Pale Moon. I remember giving it a go back when I had XP but it wouldn’t run. Forget the reason.

2) “So many times have I seen FF change something that didn’t need changing” – This! I have said this countless times over the years. I think I started using FF back when it was version 1.x something.

3) I do not like Chrome, period. The back-end might be fine, but I hate the UI. That, and the fact it has Google tendrils all throughout. No thanks.

You are right about FFx. the thing that kept me using it was the extensions and the ability to customize. The latter being very big one. They’ve chipped away at that, and now it’s buggy, like you said. Although, at the moment Waterfox isn’t running badly. I’ll give PM a try to. Thanks.

 

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