There is a reason for that very few people work on Waterfox. It's not any more powerful, nor ethical, than Firefox. Waterfox’s worst flaws include its underwhelming HTML5 support when compared to Firefox. In the browser’s subreddit, which the site links to instead of a support page, several big issues can be found by critical users. You might say that this program isn’t as powerful as other alternatives. So, in that regard, all that differentiates one “fox” browser from another is that Waterfox has several privacy options turned off by default while Firefox has them on. However, Firefox already has the option to disable sending data.
When talking “ethics”, it means that no data is sent to the Waterfox project or to Mozilla, which does sound like an important step forward. Waterfox tells you upfront that it wants to be an ethical and powerful browser however, it doesn’t do so.
The consensus seems to be that Waterfox has infrequent updates, and is not yet the powerful browser it says it is.
