Not something that I’d personally use (I’m happy with the current FF layout customisation capabilities), but it’s a fucking great idea and it’s good to see people building Firefox derivatives against the “it’s all Chrome with different names” current environment.
Not sure about the hardening but as a former Vivaldi user I hope this fork flourishes. I recall Mozilla saying they want to focus on Firefox’s customisability and this cranks that to 100.
Nice to see appreciation for it in the comments too. With things like HowToGeek’s article on how Firefox forks are the devil, I feel it can hurt Firefox’s image.
I gave Pulse - a recent Firefox fork - a try and the minimalist UI (in comparison to base FF and Floorp) was really nice. Then I tried Simple Tab Groups to replace Vivaldi’s Tab Workspaces and it was better than Workspaces for me.
And then someone on fedi linked Sidebery and that basically combines STG with Tree Style Tabs. Sidebery didn’t play nicely with Pulse’s native sidebar features so I’m on base Firefox with similar user.js tweaks as well as hidden tabs.
The article is pretty old now, especially since there’s more Firefox forks than just Pale Moon and Waterfox, but it just boils down to “forks might not have features or security updates that Firefox will have”. Wonder what the Librewolf and Floorp guys would think of that now.
I looked at the website of the group? behind the project and it seems to be a UI focused team: https://ablaze.one/projects
I don't really have any gripes with Firefox's UI and won't be using Floorp but it's always good to have more people use Firefox in various ways.
Its great and has a lot of potential, I like a lot of what it does. I just wish they had packaging easily available for Fedora/RHEL through a COPR or the like. Also would’ve preferred if they used a stable release vs. the ESR of Firefox as the base, but I can understand why.
with hardening out of the box
Floorp definitely isn’t hardened out of the box in my testing. Only thing it does is seems to disable Firefox’s telemetry, which is nice, but more hardening is certainly needed through other projects like Arkenfox (which work here on Floorp too). Also looks like Floorp makes it easier to toggle some privacy settings that you’d usually have to tweak the about:config for, and comes pre-installed with uBlock Origin, which is great.
I think overall my only concern with Floorp will be how well and quickly the developer can keep up with updates. The track record for now looks good, but only time will tell. Besides that, this is a good and very promising project, will definitely keep an eye on it.
Security concerns. There’s a lot of debate over it, but from the research I’ve done, I believe the Flatpak of Firefox is less secure, since it seems to remove part of Firefox’s internal sandboxing, and relies heavily on Flatpak’s sandboxing.
Basically makes it easier to compromise your data within the browser (like cookies, site data, passwords, etc), but maybe harder to get to the rest of your OS.
I just prefer using the rpm of Firefox with Firejail, as that keeps Firefox’s built-in sandboxing intact, while adding an extra layer similar to Flatpak to restrict it further. Best of both worlds.
Interesting. It’s my understanding that flatpaks deliver the app as close as possible to the way that the developer intended. With an rpm, someone had to go and take the app from the developer and make it into an rpm, so there’s an extra step there.
For sandboxing, yes, flatpak does do a really good job of that. Otherwise, apps would get sandboxed on Linux with either SELinux or AppArmor.
For security, flatpaks give you the latest version of a package and updates come in automatically, so I view them as being very secure.
Please point out any errors with my reasoning (open invitation to anyone). Thanks!
I just switched from linux mint to lmde 6 as well and it does feel very much the same cinnamon-y DE I left. The only difference so far is I had to install nvidia drivers myself as it doesn't seem to come with a driver manager like mint did. I've gotten everything else I used so far set up fine but... I guess I haven't tried gaming yet which I guess might be important to check out, will have to soon
I’ve heard something similar but wonder how true that is.
This fork kinda disproves it to some extent?
I’ve never had anything to do with code for native apps, but it just seems odd. Why would the rendering engine be tightly coupled with the window decorations? If they can be changed between versions I imagine they can be changed between forks?
Like I said, I’m no authority, just curious about this aspect.
Floorp is still Firefox at its core as it’s still using Firefox’s UI and building on top of it, while Chromium can be embedded into a GUI (see Vivaldi and projects like CEF and Electron). That doesn’t discredit it, in fact some of Floorp’s changes are pretty good for customisabiity and user experience. That being said, I was told that the engine powering Firefox was able to be embedded but it had many issues to the point where integrating Chromium was easier.
On a similar note, I know Pulse Browser is part of an overarching project to make forking of Firefox an easier job, and I know they and the Floorp people are friendly.
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