Open Source @lemmy.ml SagXD @lemm.ee 9 mo. ago

Floorp Browser: One of the best fork of firefox in customization

40 comments

I just learned about it yesterday. Seems like Vivaldi but on gecko, which I always wanted to see.
Unfortunately it seems like it's maintained by only one overworked dev. It needs more funding and more devs.
- AFAIK it's maintained by a group called Ablaze and I think I saw them mention they are university students and opensource enthusiasts in Github discussions.
  
  There are blog posts on their site about changes to their team and leadership. Their blog is in Japanese but I just translate it with Firefox's inbuilt translator. So I don't think it's a single dev.
  
  Oh my bad then. That was just the impression I got based on posts in floorp subreddit.
- The most similar, not to say identical to floorp, is Midori. Other which try to recreate old Opera is Otter (Qt5, not Gecko), also nice, private, FOSS and blazing fast.
  
  Midori seems pretty shady. I remember it as a super minimalistic browser, but now it seems like they are straight up taking someone elses work and just changing the name and sponsor links within. I tried it and it seems like 1:1 copy of floorp.
- So it has tab stacking? (I don't treestyle/vertical tabs, it's not the same thing)
  
  I only took a glance, but I didn't notice that feature unfortunately.
  
  You mean multi tab ?
Seems like a good browser. The only issue is how maintained will it be. Also, librewolf has been released and maintained properly and is proven time and time again. Not sure how different it is from LW.
- There's a hype around floorp right now. Certainly because it's new and it offers a high level of aesthetic customization.
  
  Unfortunately it doesn't work for me because:
  
  it takes up too much RAM compared to others. Even though people don't really care about that on modern machine it goes against my philosophy.
  
  I've been tweaking Firefox for a long time to get the highest privacy possible but it was extremely painful and I don't want to redo that with floorp.
  
  my system look is extremely minimalist and I remove any visual effects in apps I use which would go against the point of floorp.
  
  These are some reasons why I went with librewolf since it was released in 2020. It's efficient, well maintained, kept up to date with the latest Firefox version, and most importantly to me: deeply respectful of your privacy. Their privacy approach is very well explained in the FAQ It passed all the EFF tests better than any browser I've tested after hours of tweaks.
  
  This is only my personal experience and preference. Per the Floorp developer himself privacy is not given the utmost care and users should prefer librewolf in that regard. If you want to use normal privacy and excellent Firefox derivatives, with no doubts, floorp will fit your needs.
  
  highest privacy possible but it was extremely painful and I don't want to redo that with floorp.
  
  Uhm... policies or user.js? Look at arkenfox, create an override, use their updater. Dont do about:config changes on your own. You can just copy-paste that user.js into the floorp profile.
  
  Policies are also nice, mozilla has good documentation.
  
  Floorp being based off ESR is the downside of all the fancy GUI tweaks, just like with Thunderbird. Would not want to use that. Like, JXL is already working in regular Firefox with the right build arguments
  
  Have you seen the mercury fork? it looks more aligned to your philosophy. I've tried it, and it seems very interesting. I'm not using it just because they're often a few versions behind mainline, but it's on my watchlist.
I really like it too, it feels very fast compared to normal Firefox
- Yep, I agree with you. It's very fast compared to normal firefox on my pc.
- "Safari feels snappier"
  
  I'm talking about desktop experience, but sure...?
Why?

I see the web site, but the features listed are common to many other forks. What makes Floorp better than, say, Mull?
- Floorp is available on desktop, while Mull is mostly Android
  
  "Mostly?" It's a desktop program available in the Arch repos. Why is it "mostly?"
- If you wanna go for privacy then Mullvad , Tor or Librewolf. But For customization and stuff floorp is good.
It's an interesting attempt to replicate Vivaldi's functionality in a Firefox fork. Unfortunately it retains the horrible printing experience of Firefox.
- Printing like to dead trees?
  
  You could just use the system print dialog instead of Firefox's if that works better for you, I think it's possible to set it as default.
  
  Just read a policy for that, or user.js, or about:config
  
  Yeah I tried that. On KDE Neon there's no instant preview of what's getting printed in the system print dialog. Which means even more dead trees get wasted. Printing is a functionality that Mozilla has decided is unimportant so it's unlikely to ever improve.

You've viewed 40 comments.