I have observed a big anti-waterfox and anti-fork atmosphere in the Firefox Community. I don't think the criticism of Waterfox is honest, because the browser has been doing exceptionally well (always including critical bugs) for a one-man project and every Firefox Fork should be welcomed.
The official response by Mozilla has always been to avoid ALL forks and ALL old versions like the plaque. I know why Mozilla wants to suppress them, but the community shouldn't. Waterfox is basically the result of the decision by Mozilla to abandon a part of their most loyal userbase.
In theory a diverse set of browsers actually increases security due to the lack of attack surfaces with which you can target a wide audience.
Because basically all attacks that you have to fear from normal browsing as an average user are actually non-targeted attacks, and those attacks usually focus on a large user-base, in order to be financially viable. Also a script-blocker is probably the only thing needed to reduce attack surface to basically zero for non-targeted attacks.
The security argument is actually the only case one can make against Waterfox. While it is partially valid, there are many other reasons why people use a browser, which is exactly why Waterfox has so many users. Not everyone wants to focus on high level and mostly theoretical security.
By the way, the founder of Waterfox has published an alpha-version based on Firefox 86 ESR.
> GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons.
EDIT: removed a clause about the relationship with IceWeasel, thanks for the historical context @quadrangle and @war1025
Note that Gnu IceCat, formerly Gnu IceWeasel, is a completely separate project from Debian Iceweasel, which was just a redistribution of Firefox without copyrighted icons.
> In theory a diverse set of browsers actually increases security due to the lack of attack surfaces with which you can target a wide audience.
This is intellectually dishonest and the root of the reductive thinking that a target is too small to matter so why should the target invest in security.
The topic we are talking about doesn't imply the question of no security vs. high security, it is way more nuanced, and most Waterfox users probably enjoy a very high level of security due to the content blockers they use.
Also I think my claim that browser diversity actually increases security of the bigger system as a whole is correct, because I did mention it is only valid for non-targeted attacks.
There would be no financially viable way I can think of of targeting waterfox users with code on a website, because there are basically no waterfox users. Even if you manage to include some malware code somewhere on the most used websites, you will probably not get more than a handful of waterfox users to compromise their system.
The official response by Mozilla has always been to avoid ALL forks and ALL old versions like the plaque. I know why Mozilla wants to suppress them, but the community shouldn't. Waterfox is basically the result of the decision by Mozilla to abandon a part of their most loyal userbase.
In theory a diverse set of browsers actually increases security due to the lack of attack surfaces with which you can target a wide audience.
Because basically all attacks that you have to fear from normal browsing as an average user are actually non-targeted attacks, and those attacks usually focus on a large user-base, in order to be financially viable. Also a script-blocker is probably the only thing needed to reduce attack surface to basically zero for non-targeted attacks.
The security argument is actually the only case one can make against Waterfox. While it is partially valid, there are many other reasons why people use a browser, which is exactly why Waterfox has so many users. Not everyone wants to focus on high level and mostly theoretical security.
By the way, the founder of Waterfox has published an alpha-version based on Firefox 86 ESR.