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Waterfox web browser sold to System1
It appears that the Waterfox web browser has been sold to System1 recently, the same company that bought the Startpage search engine some time ago. To be precise, Startpage was bought by Privacy One Group Ltd which System1 owns. System1 is an advertising company that tries to "make advertising better and safer, while respecting consumer privacy".
[...] Privacy expert Liz McIntyre, who was involved with Startpage prior to the ownership change, noticed in October 2019 that System1 was looking to hire a web browser developer. She decided to keep an eye on potential web browser sales as it was likely that System1 was interested in buying an established web browser with a user base instead of building one from scratch.
The job description provides insight on the potential target: It revealed that development would focus on the Mozilla platform and that a key goal was to keep a classic version of the browser up-to-date.
[...] There are not that many browsers that match the description which made the most popular ones, Waterfox and Pale Moon, the most likely target for a sale.
See also: Waterfox has joined System1
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday February 16 2020, @11:55PM (3 children)
Anyway waterfox is not keeping the thing secret,so I am not going to stop using waterfox together with the other browsers (which one depends on the situation), unless more sinister things happen.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Monday February 17 2020, @04:52AM (2 children)
I can also see why he's done it, single-handedly running a project that tries to de-crapify the mess made by a 1,000-person company must be a really thankless task, so having a bit of support behind him after years of mostly going it alone would be a blessing. If it's a choice between no Waterfox and having it funded by a third-party commercial organisation, I'd rather have the latter.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday February 18 2020, @12:20AM (1 child)
Yeah I'm also a happy user, and as long as they don't keep fucking with it and forcing UI and privacy changes on updates, I'll stay one. I don't need anything else other than what the browser provides, except for only critical security updates.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 18 2020, @07:51AM
That's the value proposition of Waterfox, browsing the way you want and XUL rather than Google's whatever-it-is API where half the plugins don't work any more and the ones that do are severely disfigured because Google doesn't want you doing things any way other than their way. Examples are NoScript's loss of right-click context menu to control scripts, DownThemAll's inability to download anywhere other than the system Downloads folder, Unplug's inability to work at all, etc etc, virtually every plugin that the authors have made the huge effort to port to the new API is still broken because Google don't want you doing things in anything other than the One True Google Way.