Waterfox seems to be in quite deep financial trouble
Not even reading "between" the lines, but simply... reading the lines, all stated openly by the Dev (which, at least, is good from a transparency point of view).
The dev is stating clearly on Reddit that Waterfox has been in the red, financially speaking, for quite some time.
Their new inbuilt adblocker (based on Brave's implementation) is yes partially to have something inbuilt, but also so they can (by default) let ads through on their default search provider.
And now Waterfox has been dropped by Startpage (due to Startpage losing rather than making money on Waterfox users) and Waterfox has had to (as an interim solution hopefully) adopt 1.org as their default search provider. 1.org, which is a "charitable" search engine, but which is opaque on what search index it uses, is owned by the adtech company System1, and which states in their privacy policy that they collect data and share it with various advertising networks and social media networks.
I actually love Waterfox too. I've donated to them in the past and all. But this is pretty worrying to watch it play out like this.
Links (in case anyone is interested):
- 6.6.13 release notes which details being dropped by Startpage and starting to use 1.org.
- 15 years of forking, blog post which is one of the non-Reddit sources of the Dev detailing funding issues ("There have been a few months in the red recently").
- Comment by the Dev on the GitHub discussion around the new inbuilt adblock. About halfway into it is where the Dev (again, at least they're being transparent and honest) discusses the technical how's and the financial why's of ads being let through by default on the default search provider (still Startpage at the time of the comment).