Replacing the Waterfox icon on macOS

Okay so Mozilla has gone deep into the AI hole again, so I’ve switched back to Waterfox, a fork of Waterfox that focuses on the core browsing experience and eschews all of the stuff that nobody actually wants.

Waterfox is great, but its app icon is ugly and doesn’t look like a browser to me.

macOS does let you customize app icons but it isn’t super clear how to do it successfully, so here’s a process that works for me, as of macOS Tahoe 26.4.

1. Find an icon that you like; finding a good one that’s actually transparent is surprisingly difficult but there’s some good ones here
2. Download it in a transparency-enabled format, such as png, webp, or svg
3. Open up the Icon Composer application (which is installed as part of XCode)
4. Drag the image in and set the layout to the way you like it
5. Edit > Copy As Image (⇧⌘C)
6. Find the application in Finder, and File > Get Info (⌘I)
7. Click on the application icon and do Edit > Paste (or ⌘V)
8. Restart the app

and then you should have a nicer-looking app icon: