* Waterfox also comes with “safe browsing” like every other browser but unfortunately even if you disable “deceptive content” filtering and regular updates, it will still go check with Mozilla (or Google if something goes wrong with the first alternative) for updated domain blocklists. I didn’t really dig further on this library because it’s probably required by the browser for videos to work properly, but it’s not a nice way of distributing libraries, and apparently, this also gets disabled when you disable updating. * Similar to the previous bullet, Waterfox will go fetch an h264 shared library that I imagine doesn’t come with the browser. The domain that gets accessed for this is. I think disabling general updates will also disable this request. * Playback of DRM media can be configured through the preferences pages, but even if you have it disabled the browser will still try to “update” these features for you, which involves downloading a stupid closed source anti-piracy shared library from Google for no good reason. Honestly, this is the least of the problems as it seems to just send a request to without any parameters or cookies, so it really is the minimum information required to update your browser, and again it can easily be disabled. * The browser will come with self-update enabled, but disabling it seems to completely disable the version check, which is what’s expected. There’s a shitload of things the browser “needs” to update, among them the browser itself, blocklists for several types of content such as webpages with malware and malicious addons, anti-tracking stuff, language packs, search engines, DRM (as in anti-piracy) video libs, and probably other stuff I’m forgetting. As mentioned, one of the biggest problems with the browser is updating. Overall, the biggest problem with the browser is some of its defaults and some of the things it’ll do while updating, but I haven’t seen it connect anywhere shady while browsing or when doing actions inside the browser, e.g Google Analytics. The TL DR is that the browser doesn’t seem to do anything that the original Firefox wouldn’t do and that Waterfox (and the company that it’s now a part of) doesn’t seem to have added anything new and invasive to it, which is something that I’m happy to report. I thought I’d post my analysis for others to see since I always see other Waterfox Classic users here so maybe it’ll be useful to other people. My Waterfox Classic installation is becoming increasingly broken because of not updating it in a very long time, and since I’m pretty much forced to upgrade I decided to take some time to analyze what the new version is doing since everything that’s happened with it has made me a bit uncomfortable.
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