Could you share a bit of the technical reasoning behind deprecating the other engines in favor of Camoufox?

[CalvinSmall]

Whenever I open this application on my macOS installation I receive this message "Browser support ending soon
Support for the following profiles will be removed on March 15, 2026:". I understand that the concept of donutbrowser is anti-detect, but may I suggest that there could or should be an override for this?

Being able to select a browser engine of my choice has been the main advantage of donutbrowser for me. For this reason I would assume it's a bit pushy to force users to migrate to Camoufox. For some scenarios I prefer manual control. For example: For web development when I would need to check if Firefox or Chrome are rendering the website correctly, donutbrowser was very useful.
I am sure there is one or more logical and legitimate reasons why this step is taken by the developers of this application.

In case I am missing an aspect or a fact here, I would be happy if you could point that out to a beginner like me.
The fact that this discussion board here is linked by the developers is something I took as an encouragement for open discussion.

I'd appreciate input on this train of thought.

[zhom]

Hi there :) Thank you for using Donut for so long and for raising this! It was uncomfortable for me to migrate my profiles as well.

Since you forked it 7 months ago, the project has changed drastically. I've recently added a paid plan to make it sustainable long-term, which means Donut is now going to be compared to options like Dolphin Anty and held to the same standard. My primary focus is privacy and regular browsers are really bad at that as it is impossible to prevent them from sharing hardware information without extensive patching.

There are two main reasons for deprecating the regular browser engines:

• Even before Camoufox, I would get emails from users assuming all browser options were anti-detect and using them accordingly. I got multiple confused emails about this, and if someone gets their accounts suspended because of that assumption, that's a really bad outcome. Now that it's a commercial product, I can't keep features that contradict the core promise.
• Each browser binary requires thousands of lines of integration code. Supporting them increases complexity and bug surface area, and that time is better spent improving other functionality.

As for the override idea, I'd consider it, but the confusion risk above makes it a non-starter for me. Sorry.

For what it's worth, you still get engine choice. Camoufox is Firefox/Gecko-based and Wayfern is Chromium/Blink-based. The difference is that both spoof fingerprints at the C++ level, offering maximum level of protection you can only get for free in Donut and making it impossible for even the most invasive techniques to identify your actual hardware.

In version 0.16.1, since you are on MacOS and I have auto-updates enabled by default, I added an option in settings to disable them, so that the app will only check if new updates are available without downloading and installing them. This is to ensure that you have enough time to adjust your setup in case you have too many profiles to migrate before the next update.

Hope this helps. Happy to answer any other questions!

[CalvinSmall]

Dear zhom,

thank you very much for giving me such a detailed overview of your thoughts. I highly appreciate your technical explanation and your friendly way of responding.

Of course, your core concept should be the highest priority, so I believe it would be best I fork a it again and compile myself a second donut browser.

I also see now, that a lot of my request would require more work than would pay off for a single segment of users.
I'll have a look into Camoufox and Wayfern more closely, probably this will help me a bit more.

Wishing you all the best for the further development of this project that I have had a great experience with.

Best regards
CalvinSmall