What's the dirt on Waterfox? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 day ago by unicornBro@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm aware that it used to be owned by an ad company System1. But I found this post by the founder where he said that it's now an independent project.

https://www.waterfox.net/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/

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[-] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure System1 divested themselves of it.

They still own Startpage and Startmail, though.

[-] petri@sh.itjust.works 5 points 16 hours ago

phew and thats how i accidentally discovered just now about Startpage being owned by a marketing company, somehow i missed that news

From Wikipedia

In October 2019, Startpage received a significant investment from Privacy One Group, a subsidiary of System1.

i guess now i will have to pivot search to somewhere else, i went from DuckDuckGo to Startpage years ago now i will look around for something else

[-] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 5 points 16 hours ago

I use SearXNG. I would highly recommend.

[-] petri@sh.itjust.works 4 points 16 hours ago

thanks, i heard and tried it already many times but:

I need to self-host (fine for doing it locally but im wary of opening it to access outside the network and be open to external threats since i wouldnt know how to properly handle that so i went for trying to selfhost 4get for being more lightweight)
find a trustworthy instance (don't know how, i dont mind much on what instance i choose for YouTube frontend proxies but for searches i want to be more careful, maybe if there was a search extension to randomize instance between EU-based instances i'd feel more comfortable since its what made me pivot to Startpage years ago as it was purely a EU-based company)

this post was submitted on 15 May 2025

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