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Fifteen years ago today, I posted a thread on the Overclock.net forums. I was sixteen, I had an HP Compaq TC4400 that I’d convinced my parents would “improve my school work”, and I was frustrated that Firefox didn’t have an official 64-bit build. So I compiled one myself, called it Waterfox, stuck it on SourceForge and went back to my A levels.
Within a week it had 50,000 downloads, completely unexpected. Frustratingly, being on an island in the Mediterranean meant there was no support network or anyone to turn to with regards to “what’s next”. Had I been stateside, with the infrastructure and institutional knowledge of “tech”, who knows - I might’ve had a guiding hand on how to manage something like this and work with the momentum. But alas, I would have to learn a lot of painful lessons myself.
Fast forward to today, 15 years later, and Waterfox is still here. So am I, albeit a bit older and significantly more tired. At best estimates, Waterfox probably has around 1M monthly active users.
Where it started
If you go and look at that original OCN thread, it’s a very different world. People are talking about Silverlight support, MSVCR100.dll errors, and Peacekeeper benchmark scores. Someone asks for a 64-bit Chromium build and the thread title gets updated with every new Firefox version, all the way up to 56.0.2.
Originally, and under the username MrAlex, I was only trying to earn enough forum reputation so I could trade and buy second hand PC parts. I didn’t have a plan and I certainly didn’t have a business model. I just thought it was cool that you could take someone else’s source code, compile it with some changes, and end up with something different. Open source is a wonderful thing when you’re sixteen and don’t know anything about the software development lifecycle, yearning for the mines knowledge.
What happened in between
You can scour the internet, read this blog or view the media carousel at the bottom for then until now, but the short version: Waterfox grew - a lot - over 25 million lifetime downloads, and that figure is from calculations about seven years ago so the real number is certainly higher. I went to university, studying Electronics Engineering at York before a masters in Software Engineering at Oxford. I tried to start a charitable search engine, which failed as badly run startups tend to do. Ecosia reached out and something nice happened - Waterfox users helped plant over 350,000 trees in a single year.
Then System1 came along. I joined them, served as VP of Engineering, and helped scale the browser engineering team through a NYSE IPO - a genuine education, though companies change and focus shifts.
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