17 ms·

Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan

269 points by microflash 3y ago

Kuraj 3y ago
It would be great to include more screenshots showcasing the features before I decide to download and install this.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
phantomathkg 3y ago
Looking at the 4 team members referenced in the different thread [0], we can tell they are a team of 4 people, one of them are university student and 3 high school students. Maybe we shouldn't bash them too badly and instead encourage them tempering around and contribute to open source more in the future? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37735533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37735533
- onthecanposting 3y ago
  I wouldn't be that shocked if four students with no budget produced a better product than the Mozilla Corporation.
  - NBPEL 3y ago
    Funding them would be better than funding Mozilla's CEO, they won't give Firefox much attention and we users donate to them for Firefox and they use our money to do boring (dead) projects ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
whalesalad 3y ago
Phonetically - as a Japanese speaking person - how would this be pronounced?
- goodpoint 3y ago
  ...badly.
- tmtvl 3y ago
  Probably something like "furoaapu".
- matternous 3y ago
  This website[1] indicates it is pronounced like “flope” (フロープ). [1] https://www.naporitansushi.com/floorp8/ https://www.naporitansushi.com/floorp8/
roskelld 3y ago
Been using it for well over a month now. I started after giving up trying to hack Firefox into giving me vertical tabs. With Floorp I have vertical tabs that I can un/hide (using the mouse gesture feature). The end result gives a much cleaner interface where I can focus on page content and not surrounding UI. The built in mouse gesture plugin (which can be added to Firefox) takes me back to early Opera. I forgot how much I enjoyed using them.
NBPEL 3y ago
I truly love this browser, it's like Firefox+Edge/Opera but still remains fast: - Most of Floorp's features are native, so unlike addons they won't slow down Floorp by much - Vertical Tab being native makes it faster than anything else - Sidebar is useful for multi-tasking - Sleeping Tab saves system resource, and it's light for an tab unloader - Workspace is like Panorama, very useful to create multiple work environments, and plus you can wrap them in containers to get the most out of Firefox's container feature - Customizable hotkey is useful to rebind your hotkey, improve keyboard browsing experience, one of the rare browser that support hotkey rebinding.
qalmakka 3y ago
What's the point of stating that "it's made in Japan"? I just don't get it. Does it have improved IME or CJK support? It's not like Japan is famous for its quality software to be honest.
- O1111OOO 3y ago
  > What's the point of stating that "it's made in Japan"? I just don't get it. What I don't get is why this is your main and only takeaway. It's such an odd and surprising reaction. When I hear, for example, that Linux is being used at a gov site in Brazil or Germany or France - I get quit excited. I like that the FOSS is making inroads in other areas. With the dominance of Chrome worldwide, I am equally excited that a group of developers from another country are helping push competition in this space, driving home the message of privacy. Mozilla needs it... we all need it for the health of the internet. These guys have been at this for a while (based on their github page) and have made installers available for the main three OSes. I'm excited to give this a try.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > It's not like Japan is famous for its quality software to be honest. Well they aren't known for software at all, but the japanese are notorious about being sticklers for quality.
- paulrouget 3y ago
  It's just that they made it in Japan. No need to overthink it :)
- thefounder 3y ago
  Maybe for someone who prefers to buy made in Japan over made in China. A made in Europe sticker would definitely appeal to me more than a made in China. At least on products that are not mass produced from established brands.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    I couldn't care less where my item is produced. It just so happens that a large variety of high-end products are produced at a higher level of quality (and cost, generally) in the West (including S Korea and Japan); but if someone introduced me to a Nigerian, Mexican, Thai, etc product that surpassed my current choice, I would switch in an instant. I don't understand caring at all about the source, unless there is some fundamental moral hangup with it (such as blood diamonds, for instance).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
iguana_lawyer 3y ago
I have been using it for months and it’s great. It’s like Vivaldi but with Firefox under the hood instead of Chrome.
waynesonfire 3y ago
Who funded this? Why?
- ldjb 3y ago
  According to the developer (Ablaze)'s website [0], development of Floorp is entirely funded by sponsors on GitHub [1]. [0] https://support.ablaze.one/articles/floorp/who-build-floorp https://support.ablaze.one/articles/floorp/who-build-floorp [1] https://github.com/sponsors/Ablaze-MIRAI https://github.com/sponsors/Ablaze-MIRAI
- rvnx 3y ago
  Seems like a person with passion and talent.
  - eloisant 3y ago
    It's a group of people apparently, but not a company or any officially registered group.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    and devs seems to younger like high school or undergraduate
bluish29 3y ago
For reference, this is not just the only player in town (for Firefox forks). There is the following: - librewolf (Desktop) [1] - Mull (Android) [2] - Iceraven (Android) [3] - Mercury (Desktop) [4] - Pulse Browser (Desktop) [5] - Waterfox (Desktop) [6] - Floorp (Desktop) [7] --> This submission - Pale Moon (Desktop) [8] - Mullvad Browser (Desktop) [9] - Tor browser (Desktop - Android) [10] This list is not inclusive. It probably contains the famous forks. [1] https://librewolf.net https://librewolf.net [2] https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix [3] https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser [4] https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury [5] https://pulsebrowser.app https://pulsebrowser.app [6] https://www.waterfox.net https://www.waterfox.net [7] https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en [8] https://www.palemoon.org https://www.palemoon.org [9] https://mullvad.net/en/browser https://mullvad.net/en/browser [10] https://www.torproject.org/download/ https://www.torproject.org/download/
- O1111OOO 3y ago
  Thanks for this list. I uncovered a couple of Desktop FF Forks I didn't know existed : Pulse Browser and Mercury (not including Floorp, this submission). A couple of months ago it was Mullvad. I'm really happy to see developers taking an active interest in modifying/forking FF. I was beginning to believe that interest in FF was dying out and so I'm finding this submission, as well as this list - extremely exciting!
- _lvbh 3y ago
  Been using Librewolf for a while simply because it has good defaults
- BirAdam 3y ago
  also: basilisk, mypal, k-meleon
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- webmobdev 3y ago
  Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org https://www.palemoon.org ) is the only real "hard" fork of Firefox. The others are all "soft" forks of Mozilla Firefox in that they all just customise some existing settings as defaults or customise the UI or integrate their own extensions of Firefox and rebrand it. The PaleMoon team however forked even Mozilla Gecko ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) ), the browser engine that is at the heart of Firefox to create the Goanna browser engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) ) that now powers the PaleMoon browser and the Unified XUL Platform (a framework that can be used to create multi-platform desktop applications with web technologies). Another "hard" fork of Firefox Gecko is the Servo browsing engine ( https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ ) though no browser application has been built on it yet.
strobe 3y ago
very nice that it has option to move tabs to bottom and hide address bar automatically - what other forks has support for that? (bottom tabs - seems previously it was possible to do that for vanilla Firefox via userChrome.css but that becoming harder to do which each release)
- MrAlex94 3y ago
  > what other forks has support for that Waterfox has had these features for a few years now.
  - whitten 3y ago
    I assume Waterfox is a FF clone/fork, What is its advantage?
surrTurr 3y ago
Actually a great browser. Just installed it and I think I'll make the switch from Firefox, it has so many cool power user features! Just wondering: Is there also a shortcut to toggle the right sidebar?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
anyone know what the automation possibilities with this are?
papaver-somnamb 3y ago
Seeing some talk about "built in Japan": This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. AFAICT, pride is a main constituent. There is a strong desire for Japanese to have accomplishments to be proud of to the world, to stand out on a crowded world stage. Another is this phrase particularly signals to other Japanese: Hey, choose this software, because it was made by our kind (pride), and its operation might mesh better with your cognitive patterns. oh, and the Japanese localization is bound to be 1st class (a small rarity). One more: Japanese like to judge things after getting the thing into their hands and evaluating it (物で判断する), and word-of-mouth is mighty powerful in Japan. So "built in Japan" means it's pre-vetted by Japanese, and that is in turn a powerful seal of quality. Oh, and if there are some flaws, we can overlook them knowing that someone will eventually get round to dealing with them. It's a civil and respectful community-minded approach that mirrors Japanese culture in the large. If you are so inclined, there is a whole multi-faceted Made in Japan movement. Outside of the context of Japan or being of a Japanese mind, the value of this statement depends greatly on the context. For medicine, semiconductors, industrial equipment? Made in Japan is often a solid choice. For software? Japan is an advanced nation, plenty of highly-skilled knowledge workers, and has a very long history with software development; this software is probably competently done. On the other hand, it might mean the software is designed a little .. mysterious .. to non-Japanese eyes due to those aforementioned cognitive patterns but also a differing cultural context. For example using the color blue to signify "build successful" in Jenkins instead of green.
- Razengan 3y ago
  Even in other countries "Made In Japan" still automatically implies quality.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  But is it written in Rust?
- brabel 3y ago
  > This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets: * those who normally favor their own country's products. * those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world. Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea. Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :). [1] https://australianmade.com.au/ https://australianmade.com.au/
acd 3y ago
Happy to see tracking protection in Floorp. Why you need tracking protection. Try javascript fingerprinting: * https://amiunique.org/fingerprint https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
replete 3y ago
I've been trying out all the firefox forks that come out and end up back on master Firefox (on desktop, Mull wins on Android IMO) due to the inevitable limits of developer time on the project. The value proposition is never quite worth it for the downsides. A web browser is not a trivial project to build and upstream changes are unrelenting. Just like I've seen in Linux for 20+ years, we see different tribes basically working on the same thing in slightly different ways, and I find my self thinking over and over "Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together?". Particularly with the Firefox forks where projects seem to struggle with the release cadence. It's a rhetorical question though - effective organization appears hard to scale especially when there is no money involved. How many cash rich companies have you worked at that have lost the plot? I would really like to see Firefox win again in the browser battles. I personally believe that its the UX where differentiation from the chromiums is opportune with many interesting and desirable new UI paradigms emerging in some the recent third-party browser upstarts.
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  > Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together? Why are chefs baking bread? There's buildings to construct.
- crabbone 3y ago
  Why forks? -- There are a lot of decisions made by the upstream that are... let's put it mildly, "opinionated" (but really, just idiotic). But you cannot argue with majority or whoever leads the project. So, many times you don't do it as a way to kill time. You do it because none of what you have works. If I had time and enough knowledge of any of the existing browsers codebases, I'd definitely try to create my own version. Here are things that are desperately needed and some even have been removed from browsers for no reason that I would like to have back. 1. Keyboard-driven interface. 2. Decent access to the browser's internal state for testing purposes. When it comes to (1), there used to be a common pattern where pressing Alt would underscore letters in labels necessary to press in order to select that element. This is long gone now (and, frankly, wasn't that great, but it was something...) To clarify: it's not gone because the feature was removed, it's gone because a lot of controls simply don't have any labels, which breaks the system. Today, most browser elements have no way of activating them with the keyboard. Just a big middle finger from browser vendors. When it comes to (2), the only thing we have is Selenium (and sometimes some extra stuff on top of that). But, Selenium has no access to anything that happens in the networking side of things (that's in the Web browser, which is all about networking... right?) So you cannot know if the page is loading anything, what it's loading, what's the status of things being loaded. It's ridiculous that people write tests with this handicap. With Selenium you also don't have access to code execution. So, you cannot see if the function was called, a variable was set etc. It's ridiculous how poor your access to the state of the program running in the browser is. You used to be able to side-load some JavaScript into the browser and get access to browser's chrome, but that was removed because it was a "security concern" (but really, power-user features being removed is just a plan for cutting down functionality that affects the least users, has nothing to do with security). Do I expect Firefox or any other browser to implement any of that any time soon or ever? -- Well, let's limit that to my lifetime, and the answer is a resounding "no". Hence forking.
sesm 3y ago
Looks like Floorp in relation to Firefox is the same as Vivaldi in relation to Chrome: a fork aimed at power users with a native support for vertical tabs. Will keep an eye on it. Meanwhile, I spend several minutes trying to create a new workspace and failed to do it. It's ok, will definitely give Floorp another try when it transitions from Beta to a stable release.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
zelphirkalt 3y ago
I was under the impression (although I have never looked at the code), that Firefox UI is quite inflexible. It is fully functional for me every day and I am not missing anything (at least that I know of), but always thought, that it would probably be difficult to change the basics of FF UI. Maybe it is more flexible than I thought? Or they (Floorp) have put it great effort.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  Firefox UI is very flexible, it's mainly just html+css+javascript at this point. But they have greatly removed support for changing through the UI itself over the years. So now you need to to change it through add-ons and hacks (userstyle/userchrome). Floorp seems to build mostly on those hacks and some internal addons of their own.

269 points by microflash 3y ago

Kuraj 3y ago

It would be great to include more screenshots showcasing the features before I decide to download and install this.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

phantomathkg 3y ago

Looking at the 4 team members referenced in the different thread [0], we can tell they are a team of 4 people, one of them are university student and 3 high school students. Maybe we shouldn't bash them too badly and instead encourage them tempering around and contribute to open source more in the future? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37735533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37735533

onthecanposting 3y ago
I wouldn't be that shocked if four students with no budget produced a better product than the Mozilla Corporation.
- NBPEL 3y ago
  Funding them would be better than funding Mozilla's CEO, they won't give Firefox much attention and we users donate to them for Firefox and they use our money to do boring (dead) projects ?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

whalesalad 3y ago

Phonetically - as a Japanese speaking person - how would this be pronounced?

goodpoint 3y ago
...badly.
tmtvl 3y ago
Probably something like "furoaapu".
matternous 3y ago
This website[1] indicates it is pronounced like “flope” (フロープ). [1] https://www.naporitansushi.com/floorp8/ https://www.naporitansushi.com/floorp8/

roskelld 3y ago

Been using it for well over a month now. I started after giving up trying to hack Firefox into giving me vertical tabs. With Floorp I have vertical tabs that I can un/hide (using the mouse gesture feature). The end result gives a much cleaner interface where I can focus on page content and not surrounding UI. The built in mouse gesture plugin (which can be added to Firefox) takes me back to early Opera. I forgot how much I enjoyed using them.

NBPEL 3y ago

I truly love this browser, it's like Firefox+Edge/Opera but still remains fast: - Most of Floorp's features are native, so unlike addons they won't slow down Floorp by much - Vertical Tab being native makes it faster than anything else - Sidebar is useful for multi-tasking - Sleeping Tab saves system resource, and it's light for an tab unloader - Workspace is like Panorama, very useful to create multiple work environments, and plus you can wrap them in containers to get the most out of Firefox's container feature - Customizable hotkey is useful to rebind your hotkey, improve keyboard browsing experience, one of the rare browser that support hotkey rebinding.

qalmakka 3y ago

What's the point of stating that "it's made in Japan"? I just don't get it. Does it have improved IME or CJK support? It's not like Japan is famous for its quality software to be honest.

O1111OOO 3y ago
> What's the point of stating that "it's made in Japan"? I just don't get it. What I don't get is why this is your main and only takeaway. It's such an odd and surprising reaction. When I hear, for example, that Linux is being used at a gov site in Brazil or Germany or France - I get quit excited. I like that the FOSS is making inroads in other areas. With the dominance of Chrome worldwide, I am equally excited that a group of developers from another country are helping push competition in this space, driving home the message of privacy. Mozilla needs it... we all need it for the health of the internet. These guys have been at this for a while (based on their github page) and have made installers available for the main three OSes. I'm excited to give this a try.
diogenes4 3y ago
> It's not like Japan is famous for its quality software to be honest. Well they aren't known for software at all, but the japanese are notorious about being sticklers for quality.
paulrouget 3y ago
It's just that they made it in Japan. No need to overthink it :)
thefounder 3y ago
Maybe for someone who prefers to buy made in Japan over made in China. A made in Europe sticker would definitely appeal to me more than a made in China. At least on products that are not mass produced from established brands.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  I couldn't care less where my item is produced. It just so happens that a large variety of high-end products are produced at a higher level of quality (and cost, generally) in the West (including S Korea and Japan); but if someone introduced me to a Nigerian, Mexican, Thai, etc product that surpassed my current choice, I would switch in an instant. I don't understand caring at all about the source, unless there is some fundamental moral hangup with it (such as blood diamonds, for instance).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

iguana_lawyer 3y ago

I have been using it for months and it’s great. It’s like Vivaldi but with Firefox under the hood instead of Chrome.

waynesonfire 3y ago

Who funded this? Why?

ldjb 3y ago
According to the developer (Ablaze)'s website [0], development of Floorp is entirely funded by sponsors on GitHub [1]. [0] https://support.ablaze.one/articles/floorp/who-build-floorp https://support.ablaze.one/articles/floorp/who-build-floorp [1] https://github.com/sponsors/Ablaze-MIRAI https://github.com/sponsors/Ablaze-MIRAI
rvnx 3y ago
Seems like a person with passion and talent.
- eloisant 3y ago
  It's a group of people apparently, but not a company or any officially registered group.
- fomine3 3y ago
  and devs seems to younger like high school or undergraduate

bluish29 3y ago

For reference, this is not just the only player in town (for Firefox forks). There is the following: - librewolf (Desktop) [1] - Mull (Android) [2] - Iceraven (Android) [3] - Mercury (Desktop) [4] - Pulse Browser (Desktop) [5] - Waterfox (Desktop) [6] - Floorp (Desktop) [7] --> This submission - Pale Moon (Desktop) [8] - Mullvad Browser (Desktop) [9] - Tor browser (Desktop - Android) [10] This list is not inclusive. It probably contains the famous forks. [1] https://librewolf.net https://librewolf.net [2] https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix [3] https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser [4] https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury [5] https://pulsebrowser.app https://pulsebrowser.app [6] https://www.waterfox.net https://www.waterfox.net [7] https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en [8] https://www.palemoon.org https://www.palemoon.org [9] https://mullvad.net/en/browser https://mullvad.net/en/browser [10] https://www.torproject.org/download/ https://www.torproject.org/download/

O1111OOO 3y ago
Thanks for this list. I uncovered a couple of Desktop FF Forks I didn't know existed : Pulse Browser and Mercury (not including Floorp, this submission). A couple of months ago it was Mullvad. I'm really happy to see developers taking an active interest in modifying/forking FF. I was beginning to believe that interest in FF was dying out and so I'm finding this submission, as well as this list - extremely exciting!
_lvbh 3y ago
Been using Librewolf for a while simply because it has good defaults
BirAdam 3y ago
also: basilisk, mypal, k-meleon
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
webmobdev 3y ago
Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org https://www.palemoon.org ) is the only real "hard" fork of Firefox. The others are all "soft" forks of Mozilla Firefox in that they all just customise some existing settings as defaults or customise the UI or integrate their own extensions of Firefox and rebrand it. The PaleMoon team however forked even Mozilla Gecko ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) ), the browser engine that is at the heart of Firefox to create the Goanna browser engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) ) that now powers the PaleMoon browser and the Unified XUL Platform (a framework that can be used to create multi-platform desktop applications with web technologies). Another "hard" fork of Firefox Gecko is the Servo browsing engine ( https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ ) though no browser application has been built on it yet.

strobe 3y ago

very nice that it has option to move tabs to bottom and hide address bar automatically - what other forks has support for that? (bottom tabs - seems previously it was possible to do that for vanilla Firefox via userChrome.css but that becoming harder to do which each release)

MrAlex94 3y ago
> what other forks has support for that Waterfox has had these features for a few years now.
- whitten 3y ago
  I assume Waterfox is a FF clone/fork, What is its advantage?

surrTurr 3y ago

Actually a great browser. Just installed it and I think I'll make the switch from Firefox, it has so many cool power user features! Just wondering: Is there also a shortcut to toggle the right sidebar?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

anyone know what the automation possibilities with this are?

papaver-somnamb 3y ago

Seeing some talk about "built in Japan": This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. AFAICT, pride is a main constituent. There is a strong desire for Japanese to have accomplishments to be proud of to the world, to stand out on a crowded world stage. Another is this phrase particularly signals to other Japanese: Hey, choose this software, because it was made by our kind (pride), and its operation might mesh better with your cognitive patterns. oh, and the Japanese localization is bound to be 1st class (a small rarity). One more: Japanese like to judge things after getting the thing into their hands and evaluating it (物で判断する), and word-of-mouth is mighty powerful in Japan. So "built in Japan" means it's pre-vetted by Japanese, and that is in turn a powerful seal of quality. Oh, and if there are some flaws, we can overlook them knowing that someone will eventually get round to dealing with them. It's a civil and respectful community-minded approach that mirrors Japanese culture in the large. If you are so inclined, there is a whole multi-faceted Made in Japan movement. Outside of the context of Japan or being of a Japanese mind, the value of this statement depends greatly on the context. For medicine, semiconductors, industrial equipment? Made in Japan is often a solid choice. For software? Japan is an advanced nation, plenty of highly-skilled knowledge workers, and has a very long history with software development; this software is probably competently done. On the other hand, it might mean the software is designed a little .. mysterious .. to non-Japanese eyes due to those aforementioned cognitive patterns but also a differing cultural context. For example using the color blue to signify "build successful" in Jenkins instead of green.

Razengan 3y ago
Even in other countries "Made In Japan" still automatically implies quality.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
But is it written in Rust?
brabel 3y ago
> This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets: * those who normally favor their own country's products. * those who almost universally loathe their own country's products. I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world. Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea. Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :). [1] https://australianmade.com.au/ https://australianmade.com.au/

acd 3y ago

Happy to see tracking protection in Floorp. Why you need tracking protection. Try javascript fingerprinting: * https://amiunique.org/fingerprint https://amiunique.org/fingerprint

replete 3y ago

I've been trying out all the firefox forks that come out and end up back on master Firefox (on desktop, Mull wins on Android IMO) due to the inevitable limits of developer time on the project. The value proposition is never quite worth it for the downsides. A web browser is not a trivial project to build and upstream changes are unrelenting. Just like I've seen in Linux for 20+ years, we see different tribes basically working on the same thing in slightly different ways, and I find my self thinking over and over "Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together?". Particularly with the Firefox forks where projects seem to struggle with the release cadence. It's a rhetorical question though - effective organization appears hard to scale especially when there is no money involved. How many cash rich companies have you worked at that have lost the plot? I would really like to see Firefox win again in the browser battles. I personally believe that its the UX where differentiation from the chromiums is opportune with many interesting and desirable new UI paradigms emerging in some the recent third-party browser upstarts.

ranger_danger 3y ago
> Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together? Why are chefs baking bread? There's buildings to construct.
crabbone 3y ago
Why forks? -- There are a lot of decisions made by the upstream that are... let's put it mildly, "opinionated" (but really, just idiotic). But you cannot argue with majority or whoever leads the project. So, many times you don't do it as a way to kill time. You do it because none of what you have works. If I had time and enough knowledge of any of the existing browsers codebases, I'd definitely try to create my own version. Here are things that are desperately needed and some even have been removed from browsers for no reason that I would like to have back. 1. Keyboard-driven interface. 2. Decent access to the browser's internal state for testing purposes. When it comes to (1), there used to be a common pattern where pressing Alt would underscore letters in labels necessary to press in order to select that element. This is long gone now (and, frankly, wasn't that great, but it was something...) To clarify: it's not gone because the feature was removed, it's gone because a lot of controls simply don't have any labels, which breaks the system. Today, most browser elements have no way of activating them with the keyboard. Just a big middle finger from browser vendors. When it comes to (2), the only thing we have is Selenium (and sometimes some extra stuff on top of that). But, Selenium has no access to anything that happens in the networking side of things (that's in the Web browser, which is all about networking... right?) So you cannot know if the page is loading anything, what it's loading, what's the status of things being loaded. It's ridiculous that people write tests with this handicap. With Selenium you also don't have access to code execution. So, you cannot see if the function was called, a variable was set etc. It's ridiculous how poor your access to the state of the program running in the browser is. You used to be able to side-load some JavaScript into the browser and get access to browser's chrome, but that was removed because it was a "security concern" (but really, power-user features being removed is just a plan for cutting down functionality that affects the least users, has nothing to do with security). Do I expect Firefox or any other browser to implement any of that any time soon or ever? -- Well, let's limit that to my lifetime, and the answer is a resounding "no". Hence forking.

sesm 3y ago

Looks like Floorp in relation to Firefox is the same as Vivaldi in relation to Chrome: a fork aimed at power users with a native support for vertical tabs. Will keep an eye on it. Meanwhile, I spend several minutes trying to create a new workspace and failed to do it. It's ok, will definitely give Floorp another try when it transitions from Beta to a stable release.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

zelphirkalt 3y ago

I was under the impression (although I have never looked at the code), that Firefox UI is quite inflexible. It is fully functional for me every day and I am not missing anything (at least that I know of), but always thought, that it would probably be difficult to change the basics of FF UI. Maybe it is more flexible than I thought? Or they (Floorp) have put it great effort.

PurpleRamen 3y ago
Firefox UI is very flexible, it's mainly just html+css+javascript at this point. But they have greatly removed support for changing through the UI itself over the years. So now you need to to change it through add-ons and hacks (userstyle/userchrome). Floorp seems to build mostly on those hacks and some internal addons of their own.