Waterfox — Mocalabs

In light of Firefox going all in on AI, I decided to check out Waterfox. I had been using Librewolf (which I still love) but there’s something that’s just … nice? … about Waterfox.

I followed the instructions to install Waterfox from source on my Gentoo machine (although I opted for the Flatpak on Fedora). This put Waterfox on the $PATH but not create a .desktop entry, so I created one manually. On Gentoo, this is in /usr/share/applications.

# /usr/share/applications/waterfox.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Waterfox
Comment=Web Browser
Exec=waterfox
Icon=/opt/waterfox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default64.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;

Then, I made it the default browser with:

xdg-mime default waterfox.desktop x-scheme-handler/https x-scheme-handler/http

xdg-settings set default-web-browser waterfox.desktop

Update: March 2026

At this point in time, I have been using Waterfox exclusively for personal web browsing. Nothing against Librewolf, I’m just liking Waterfox right now! For testing web things I have settled on Gnome’s Epiphany and Ungoogled-Chromium for now.