6.7.0-beta.1

Waterfox 6.7 moves from Gecko ESR 140 to Gecko ESR 153. This brings a year of upstream engine, performance, and security work into one release. Much of the Waterfox layer is also rebuilt to run natively inside the new platform.

Important

This is a beta - everything below is ready to test, and bug reports are helpful.

Tree Tabs

Waterfox 6.6 shipped tree-style tabs as a bundled extension, a fork of Tree Style Tab, living in its own sidebar panel. In 6.7, tree tabs are a native part of the browser, built directly into the vertical tab strip.

• Tree tabs share code with vertical tabs, tab groups, the sidebar customisation panel, and themes, so all four stay in sync.
• Tree structure now saves through the browser's own session store; existing trees and settings migrate on upgrade.
• How far you drag a tab horizontally sets its nesting depth, and a tab's whole subtree moves with it, including across windows.
• Settings under Tabs and Browsing covers how new tabs attach, what happens when you close a parent, double-click behaviour, branch auto-collapse, mute propagation, and nesting depth.

Warning

The native implementation is leaner than the old extension. It requires vertical tabs (the old sidebar could sit next to a horizontal tab bar), and several extras have not carried over: the large set of keyboard commands, the custom CSS editor, and the API other extensions could hook into. File a bug report if you relied on one of these.

Nova and Colour System

The browser style is now a choice of three: Nova, a new, sharper Waterfox style with a brighter active tab line; Proton, modern stock styling; and Photon, the classic Waterfox look with the Lepton chrome refinements. New installs start on Nova. If you are upgrading, a one-time dialog lets you keep your current style or switch to Nova; nothing changes until you choose.

The old accent colour setting, which had three options, is replaced by twelve palettes, from Smoke and Ash through Sun, Spark, Flame, Lavender, Lagoon, and Pine, each with light and dark variants that can follow your system theme. The palette also applies to built-in pages, so Settings and other internal pages use your chosen colours.

The Look and Feel pane's long list of small tweaks (corner rounding, icon hiding, centring, and similar) is no longer in Settings. Seven remain for Photon: transparency, auto-hide options, close button on hover, and drag space. The rest still work for Photon via about:config. File a bug report for any toggle you rely on.

Ad Blocking

The built-in blocker, shipped since 6.6, changes in several ways:

• Moves to its own Ad Blocking pane in Settings, out of Privacy and Security.
• Anti-adblock and annoyance scriptlets now inject before page scripts run, fixing sites that previously raced the blocker and won.
• Redirect resources, the blank media and neutered scripts used as stand-ins for blocked requests, grow from 17 to 62, so fewer blocked requests break the page.
• Exceptions added in a private window last until the session ends and are kept separate from your normal exceptions; permanent exceptions no longer apply in private browsing.
• The "Load anyway" button now verifies the request came from a blocked page, list downloads are capped in size and refuse redirects, and cache writes are atomic.

Tip

Qwant has joined the search partner list, so the blocker allows ads on qwant.com by default, the same funding arrangement used for our other search partners. Turn it off in the Ad Blocking pane if you prefer.

Search Defaults

The engine line-up is unchanged (1.org, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Google, Mojeek, Qwant, and Waterfox Private Search). The default changes from 1.org everywhere to Qwant in 26 regions (most of Europe, plus Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the UK, and the US), and DuckDuckGo everywhere else.

Note

When Qwant becomes available in more regions, the default in those regions will switch from DuckDuckGo to Qwant. As above, that only applies if you've left the default alone - if you've manually selected DuckDuckGo yourself, your choice stays put.

Onboarding Setup and Firefox Import

Onboarding setup is rebuilt and covers browser style and density, theme colour, tab arrangement (horizontal, vertical, or tree) and tab strip placement, privacy defaults, and data import. It is now localised; earlier versions were English-only. The old screens recommending extensions and showing an Android QR code are gone.

The Firefox profile migrator is rewritten and brings over bookmarks, history, form data, cookies, and passwords. Extensions using native messaging now also find companion app manifests installed for Firefox on macOS and Linux, so password manager connectors and similar tools work without reinstalling anything.

Existing users keep their current setup: the only prompt after upgrading is a short dialog offering to keep Photon or switch to Nova.

Security & Privacy

• Certificate revocation data (OneCRL and CRLite) and the add-on blocklist update over the network again. 6.6 froze these at build time along with everything else; 6.7 syncs only the collections that matter for security and keeps the rest on offline bundles.
• Translation models now download on demand, so page translation is no longer limited to the language pairs bundled at build time.
• 6.6 partially neutered Safe Browsing; 6.7 disables it fully, so no Google Safe Browsing endpoints are contacted.
• The AI surfaces that came with the Firefox 153 platform (chat sidebar, shortcuts, and related controls) are off by default.
• The address bar trust panel is included; the lookups that would query external breach data are disabled.

Ultra Protection, our DNS over Oblivious HTTP setup, stops the DNS provider from linking requests back to you. It now has Settings controls with a fallback policy choice, and the relay has been Waterfox's default DNS transport since 6.6.

Settings

6.7 adopts the redesigned Settings. Appearance controls, including the status bar toggles, move under Appearance; tab bar and bookmarks toolbar position plus the tab context menu extras move under Tabs and Browsing; ad blocking gets its own pane; and settings that exist only in Waterfox carry a "Waterfox Exclusive" badge. New tab URL is now configurable, and automatic tab grouping has Settings controls for the toggle and placement.

A few controls from 6.6 lose their UI: the WebRTC peer connection toggle, the referrer header policy menu, and the load images and enable JavaScript checkboxes. The preferences still work via about:config.

Removed in 6.7

Installing extensions directly from the Chrome Web Store and Opera Addons no longer works; the compatibility shim that converted those packages did not survive the platform jump. In truth, this was only ever technically supported - the shim could install a .crx package, but Chrome and Firefox WebExtensions have diverged so far that actually bridging the gap is a huge effort, and I'd be surprised if many easily accessible Chrome extensions still worked in practice. File a bug report if you rely on this.

Other Changes

• ARM64 builds are now available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, including the Debian and RPM packages.
• Zoom controls now sit on the status bar by default, and when Nova is in use the status bar becomes a floating pill, matching the rest of the Nova chrome.
• The New Tab page shows the search box by default.
• Automatic tab grouping now defaults to off (it was on in 6.6); turn it on under Tabs and Browsing.
• Bundled emoji font updated to Twemoji 17.0.2.

Found anything else? File a bug report.

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Full release notes with screenshots and the palette showcase: waterfox.com/releases/6.7.0-beta-1