MrAlex94

Congratulations to the developers of Zen, they've done so well with it.

I can't help but be envious at the attention they've been getting the past year or so, it's what I only dreamed of what I would achieve with Waterfox. In a sense, I'd always hoped I'd end up being the alternative to the big boys, but I never quite got there - good for them.

> How many paid auth providers let you export user password hashes so that you can seamlessly migrate to another vendor, if you want to?

Clerk is surely one of the biggest and allows you to do this.

There are a variety of appearance settings - the landing page has a demo of the 3 variations.

Not trying to copy Arc per se; Mozilla did all the work for Nova - I actually prefer it, it feels more grounded into how everyone is used to using a browser. I feel like there's little UX innovation left to be had with the interface of this bit of software.

Saying that, I always like adding extras on top - and I've spent a lot of time making sure users can tweak how they like. I didn't manage to squeeze everything into this final release, but the .1 release will re-expose a lot of customisations that are buried in `about:config` preferences.

Developer of Waterfox here - if anyone is looking for other options just know Waterfox will carry on allowing extensions to access the browsers own privileged JavaScript APIs, not just MV2 or MV3 APIs - so you’re free to do whatever you like within the browser

> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange?

Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider.

Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there.

Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.

If it wasn’t for SourceForge I’m not sure my life would’ve ended up where it is! They use to promote projects they liked and ended up putting Waterfox on their front page a few times. Really sad when they started blasting people with ads and swapping out installers with adware for popular projects. By that time I moved to Microsoft’s CodePlex, if anyone else remembers that? Felt like I was the only one using it at the time! I remember the connection speeds to it were atrocious, but appreciated they’d share ad revenue from the downloads of a projects page which was nice. I remember it was actually super expensive to offer downloads [for binaries] back then, using these code hosting websites was the only way to do it for “free”

I think people are reading into this too much - I don’t think Mozilla would ever implement an actual full spectrum ad blocker (although who knows with the new direction Firefox is headed), this will likely be used as an improvement/replacement for the current tracking protection implementation.

Weirdly enough, the same time this was added to Geckko is when I started implementing the adblock-rs library for Waterfox - I stumbled across the bindings by accident when using searchfox on the main branch instead of esr140! Quite the coincidence doing it at the same time.

The distinction I'm drawing is between a revenue share from a search partnership and something like an acceptable ads programme where individual advertisers pay to bypass the blocker - those are different things.

Yes, that's correct. Startpage is the default search partner, and their search ads aren't blocked by default. Users can enable blocking on that page too with a single toggle in settings. That's why I laid it all out in this post, to let users know - it's about keeping Waterfox sustainable (paying bills, putting food on the table) as it's my only source of income currently.

I've mentioned in another comment, that I've tried other ways such as with subscription paid services, but unfortunately there's nowhere near enough traction for it to be sustainable.

Also bare in mind Waterfox currently comes with nothing, so this is just an extra layer of protection.

Nothing to "fix" per se - webextensions need to interact with website data, otherwise they wouldn't be much use. Any extension with content script access can read page content including form fields.

The only real mitigation is being selective about which extensions you install and what permissions you grant them (even then, ownership of extensions change hands, updates can change what they do... it's a never ending battle really).