There was a topic discussing alternatives to Firefox browser.
I mentioned Waterfox as an alternative with a firm security policy.
Unfortunately the only distro with Waterfox in its package system is Gentoo. Congratulations to the Gentoo package system maintainers.
That means installing Waterfox in any of our commonly used Debian or Arch based distros could be difficult and may deter people from trying it.
There are numerous howto sites pretending to show you how to install Waterfox. The best one (imho) is
It gives two methods
- from Flatpak
- from a source file
Beware of other howto’s that suggest PPA’s and snaps. They are complicated and dangerous.
I am going to do the install from source in my own machine. This does not mean compiling… the source is a tar file and it contains binaries.
Here is what I did
1. Go to website
https://www.waterfox.net/
and download it
2. As suoeruser
cd /usr/local/src
mkdir Waterfox
cd Waterfox
cp ~/Dow*/waterfox-6.5.5.tar.bz2 .
bzip2 -dc waterfox-6.5.5.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
3. As superuser
cd waterfox
You will find 2 files waterfox-bin and waterfox.... they are identical
ln -sv waterfox /usr/local/bin/waterfox
make sure /usr/local/bin is in your path
4. Run it
$ waterfox
ATTENTION: default value of option mesa_glthread overridden by environment.
ATTENTION: default value of option mesa_glthread overridden by environment.
When you get to step 4 your screen will look like the following
That is the welcome screen of the Waterfox browser.
The second tab looks like this
That is another place you can download from.
All versions are available, the current version is 6.5.5
You can run Waterfox concurrently with Firefox… they do not interfere… Waterfox has a .waterfox file and Firefox has a .mozilla file.
Why did I install it in /usr/local?
To keep it totally separate from the package system. That is important. External software should never be put in /usr… use usr/local or your home directory or /opt or anywhere outside of /usr that is in your PATH.
You will notice I launched Waterfox from the CLI.
To get a desktop launcher, you need to create a .desktop file.
cd ~/.local/share/applications
vi waterfox.desktop
add the following
[Desktop Entry]
Version=6.0.4
Name=Waterfox
Comment=Web browser
Exec=waterfox
Icon=/usr/local/src/Waterfox/waterfox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Now a Waterfox entry will appear in your Menu under Applications → Internet.
To get an icon in my panel, I need to use the Xfce Panel tool
That is all. Keep it simple… install it by hand… then you will know exactly what you have done to your system.
The only other howt I would recommend is the offician Waterfox page
It basically says the same thing as above… flatpak or source, unless you are lucky enough to have it in your distro’s repo.
Does anyone know of a distro other than Gentoo that has Waterfox in its repo.?
