

Until just last month, there were a handful of Firefox forks to help keep elderly Macs useful, such as Parrotgeeks Firefox Legacy for Mac OS X 10.6 and TenFourFox for PowerPC Macs. But currently, it's thriving, unlike its progenitor.Īlongside Waterfox and Waterfox Classic, Pale Moon, and Basilisk, other Mozilla forks carry on work in which the Mozilla Foundation lost interest. The project is not without its own controversies, such as its purchase by ad vendor System1. Waterfox G4, based on Firefox 91, adds support for Arm-compatible Macs (and soon Arm Linux), and starts the process of switching from tracking Mozilla's ESR releases to the central branch. The third release, Waterfox G3, was based on Firefox 78 and added support for Chrome and Opera extensions, allowed the tab bar to sit below the URL box, and re-enabled the status bar. Meanwhile, development based off the modern Firefox codebase continues. Along with supporting older extensions, Waterfox Classic also supports older versions of Mac OS X back to 10.7, making it useful for users left stranded when new Apple OS releases no longer support their hardware. That branch is now known as Waterfox Classic. Notably, the project forked and continued work on Firefox 56, the last version to support classic add-ons, while back-porting subsequent security fixes. He went on to remove controversial features such as Mozilla's telemetry, sponsored links, and bundled additions such as Pocket. Lead developer Alex Kontos started it when he was a student as a project to build a 64-bit edition of Firefox long before Mozilla offered such a thing. Waterfox targets higher-end PCs and Macs.
