Just discovered Floorp browser and on first sight it looks promising. Anyone has seen this one before or know if it’s trusted?
What we actually need is a from scratch rewrite of a web browser engine but no with the financial capability to do that is interested, because paying to reinvent the wheel (or in this case browser a engine) is not a financially responsible decision and an individual certainly wont be to do it alone.
At this point maybe we may need to something as big as a mandate from the government to create a browser engine but the problem is the government is still mired from the medieval age mentality. Its not helped that the lawmaking body is a bunch of decrepit ancient people.
But I am already going off topic.
At this point, the Tor Browser (and by extension the Mullvad Browser) is the only ESR that I sort of trust.
I wasnt aware of this project. Its out of the hands of Mozilla to the Linux Foundation.
As Chromium is already open sourced and well maintained, I don’t think we need another engine. What we need is more browsers that add some new core value/feature that’s not/rarely available in the current market.
I don’t have any hope in Mozilla, as its main revenue came directly from Google for a long long time. I would rather support Google directly. It don’t add any value to the market, unlike Brave that tries its best to get the money else where, through its own search ads, crypto, VPN, AI, etc. That’s real innovation and independent of Google.
To the topic, I don’t think I would vote for Floorp. Because I’m not sure whether it has enough dev support in the long run. Changing my main web browser frequently is not fun.
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Having the biggest ad seller in the world also control the biggest web browser is not good for consumers. Mozilla is a nonprofit and has demonstrated that they ultimately have users best interest at heart whereas google has repeatedly demonstrated they do not. That’s why Firefox is important. Also, Mozilla is only reliant on google money because google has stolen so much market share from them through anticompetitive practices. Saying that chromium should be the only browser engine is the same as saying that google should hold the keys to the internet (even more so than they do now). Also just finding new ways to shove ads in peoples faces (and crypto i guess, although we’ve seen how well cryptocurrency has been doing) doesn’t seem so innovative to me 
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Without derailing the thread further, even though Google is the main maintainer of Chromium, but anyone or any corp can take and modify Chromium however they want (yes, without Google consent). Therefore, the fact that Google is the main maintainer of Chromium is not relevant to how Chrome takes the most part of all the internet.
The fact that Google is too big, and Chrome is eating a lot of traffic, none of it has anything to do with Chromium. Other players just need more resources to compete with Google/Chrome, e.g. have their owned extension store.
Maybe, without ads and any reliance from Google, someone might have to create a paid browser and hope it’ll all go well.
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Floorp is decent but I don’t really see any reason to recommend it or use it. It isn’t privacy focused at all, all it does in that aspect to my understanding is disabling telemetry and including uBlock Origin. Floorp includes a lot of tweaks and extensions built-in as well which I’m sure add a lot of attack surface and introduce possible fingerprinting. Not to mention you’re also adding another trusted party and could have potentially delayed updates, etc.
Floorp has a lot of the same issues as LibreWolf, most of what it does can just be applied to the stock Firefox, without the need of having to trust another party or having potentially delayed updates and such. Floorp is even worse though for privacy because at least LibreWolf’s main focus actually is privacy, Floorp can’t say the same. I’d avoid it for the time being.
Look at their Github, and all the Mozilla engineers working on the project. I swear it’s a side project of Mozilla.
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@Screwdriver
It is a forked repository with authorship maintained. Mozilla people aren’t actually working on it.
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Ahhhh…
Thanks!
There’s Ladybird browser engine Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project – Andreas Kling – I like computers!
You can see progress by the dev here https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jagkQMbfqJY
Create a new thread for this as it’s unrelated to Floorp.
Also, It’s far to early to be considered as even usable, let alone privacy and securely friendly.
Its been a month since the last post in this topic. Have any new reasons come to light to pay attention to floorp or is it just yet another downstream derivative browserTM / the flavor of the month on youtube/socials.
It looks like Firefox ESR with some UI tweaks that make it look somewhat like Vivaldi, and a few changes to the default pre-configuration of Firefox.