#Waterfox review security update
#Waterfox review security software

#Waterfox review security software

Some browsers either directly violate users by collecting telemetric data without consent, or you have to opt-out rather than opt-in, or they bounce around the Internet visiting places in the background without you knowing (using dns-prefetch or automatic updates etc.), using third party services that operates with a privacy policy you either cannot trust, or that are directly violating your privacy, or they have integrated third party software that do some of these things. What I am addressing in this article are browsers that are either promoted as 'privacy-respecting' by the developers, or in general are considered to be so (mostly due to misunderstanding or misinformation), while it is very clear they are not. Naturally you need to be able to use the browser on the Internet and as such you will always leave some kind of trail behind, and this article is not about how you can hide your tracks. Not only can it be difficult to actually define privacy, but it also requires a balance between freedom of choice by the users, security and usability. Privacy as a subject regarding the usage of services on the Internet is a very difficult subject to deal with. It is also about the lack of user freedom, as in the choice to enable or disable features, such as automatic updates, or forced usage of third party services, or software that the user generally is unaware of or don't have a say about.

This article isn't specifically about privacy issues only, it's about promises that are being broken, which might be about privacy. Sometimes prices on products are changed on the same website, depending on tracking information, and two people may view the exact same product on the exact same website yet be presented with very different prices. Many companies, such as Google, track which websites people visit and then use the information, for instance by sending advertising based on one's web browsing history. Privacy on the Internet is important because privacy risks range from the gathering of statistics on users to more malicious acts such as the spreading of spyware and the exploitation of various forms of bugs (software faults). | about | faq | resources | contact | rss Choose your browser carefully You can reduce your chances of getting hit with malware by using various security measures, like uBlock, NoScript, and ignoring things that say 'virus detected on your computer, click here to clean!' etc., to avoid exposure in the first place.Choose your browser carefully Whether it makes sense for you, is up to you to decide.

#Waterfox review security update

But that's not saying much, because FF56 is obsolete and shouldn't be used at all, as it received its final security update last September, and is vulnerable to many known exploits.įor me personally, the ability to use a couple of critical legacy addons makes it worth the increased security risk of Waterfox. It's true that it's far more secure than Firefox 56. Eventually there will be a Waterfox based on Firefox 60, but it seems that it won't be ready for September. However, you are still safer today than you will be in a month from now, when Mozilla stops providing security updates to Firefox 52 ESR, which many of the updates to Waterfox are based on. And the majority of legacy addons have been abandoned by their developers and don't receive any more updates, ever. Lately, releases have been made monthly, but there have several times been delays of three or fourabout two months between updates in the past year.Īdd-ons may also fall behind if you keep using older versions, in the case where the latest version requires Firefox 57+ APIs that don't exist in Waterfox.

Yes, it does mean that Waterfox is vulnerable to exploits in the time before it's patched, which may be much longer than one week.