Does anyone know the Midori browser?
Does that have any experience?
Does Astian Inc know more about it?
Desktop version Firefox based.
Android webview is based.
I guess there must have been a lot of stuff. From Chrome to Firefox, etc…
Have more services. Among others, a search engine advertised as privacy…
When Astian first came around and effectively took over Midori I found the whole process extremely suspicious.
Personally, I can’t see a reason to consider them today in light of other well known and strong options.
Products focused on user privacy
Website loads trackers from Google, Microsoft, and other third parties.
Their AstianOS download button doesn’t even work
These repos are the old pre-takeover ones:
Modern Midori does appear to be a Firefox fork on both desktop and Android
They appear to have a cryptocurrency shitcoin: MITO
Their search engine has a bunch of blank pages:
The search engine makes numerous requests to third parties including one VeVe which is a data collection/monetization company that contains full search request/terms
The search engine appears to literally just embed the Google CSE, but then claim DuckDuckGo is the source?
Their PMPrivacy browser extension is a fork of AdGuard’s, except again it has commit history stripped: GitHub - goastian/midori-pmprivacy: Midori Protect My Privacy is a multi-browser extension but officially developed for Midori Browser that blocks all advertising and trackers and protects against malware, making web browsing faster and safer.
Some upcoming VPN, and it too has blank help pages
Their about page is just lorem ipsum: https://astian[.]org/about-us/
I can keep going, but this just gets worse the more I go.
This doesn’t look like something we’d recommend. The GitHub repo for this current iteration of Midori was created about a month ago and has 11 stars. Pretty much nothing in terms of documentation anywhere.
For some reason when they moved from GitLab they recreated the repo from scratch on GitHub instead of porting the commit history over. The number of abandoned repos Midori seems to have laying around the internet just in general strikes me as rather unprofessional/sloppy development.
I’m looking through the history of Midori being taken over by “Astian” and the whole thing strikes me as very strange. Astian’s website in general leaves a lot to be desired, with broken links and incomplete pages.
The integration of their cloud and VPN services into the browser isn’t ideal. Brave is getting enough flak for that currently as-is, and Brave’s a well-known provider unlike “Astian VPN”…
We avoid recommending Firefox forks in most cases for the reasons explained in the Librewolf thread, and Midori doesn’t even seem to come close to Librewolf quality, so I see no benefit to using it over the more mainstream browsers.
Basically confirms all my thoughts.
Everything is quite suspicious and opaque.
In principle, none of this can even be understood in any way or any strategy recognized.
Is this simply because the burden falls on too few shoulders? Or just clumsy without any bad intention? Or is there even a strategy behind it?
Personal opinion:
Claiming privacy and then sending data off to known data collection companies isn’t clumsy, it is malice.
Hello friend SkewedZeppelin
We understand that some parts of our website are still incomplete and we are working every day to resolve this.
All our code is free and open source precisely to avoid this and we do not store user information, our website is located in the European Union and invasive advertising is not present but we will work to continue improving.
I appreciate your words and we will work to improve the points that you have mentioned here, our design on the site, the broken links of the pages that are under construction, among others, we regret the inconvenience but we promise to improve.
We have made significant changes, our first engine was Webkit but when we saw that Apple decided to discontinue it for Windows, we studied the alternatives and switched to Chromium, subsequently and seeing everything that has happened with the project and the direction that Google is taking, added to the saturation of browsers in Chromium months ago we decided to move to Gecko among them to improve privacy, and benefit from the fact that a single code can be executed for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux & Mac.
Android Midori for Android was born using WebView but we worked very hard to migrate it to Geckoview just as we work for iOS, it is very hard and arduous work but we do it with passion and we would like to work with the PrivacyGuides community to improve and give you private alternatives to internet users because it is something that worries us.
Our servers are located in the European Union, we do not store user information and we seek technological independence so as not to depend on Google, Mozilla or any other Big Tech, we are not a Big Tech.
@Astian
Your responses are non-answers.
Thanks, of course I can answer all the questions you ask.
The source code of the search engine has not yet been uploaded because all the code repositories are being migrated, both those in gitlab.com and in the internal Gitlab CE repository installed on the servers.The source code of the search engine has not yet been uploaded because all the code repositories are being migrated, both those in gitlab.com and in the internal Gitlab CE repository installed on the servers.
We had to start from 0 in the migration because Github incredibly had connection problems, we do not know if on our part something that is very likely or on the part of the Github servers, approximately it was more than 4GB only in the Midori fork code of Gecko the firefox engine
We have never included any tracker in our applications, neither mobile nor desktop, on the contrary, we prevent tracking. I share with you the exodus report as well as the history so that you can see that we have always been free of trackers. The system does not allow me to place the link but in Exodus you can search and find Midori and observe that she does not have trackers. on two or three occasions we have added them for use as bug reports but we have removed them and we prefer to listen to users and community.
We are also going against telemetry and do not use it and we have notified others of a telemetry project that is in the Firefox synchronization service that we are studying to deactivate. I share the image.
Google’s requests are from the sources (our servers are still modest, they are not very large, they can be considered basic, from my (personal) point of view, they have made that decision to make the search a little faster, although it is fast in itself. The VEVE thing is a topic that was being evaluated: fixed static markers that do not track and do not track the user, do not profile them and are not invasive advertising, they are of the same style as those provided by Qwant. Modest and simple, I understand that at this moment they are already are not available you can refresh the search.
We do not track users, our website is developed in WordPress, many of the plugins have links to Google in the sources, if you go to our home site, midori-browser, etc. you will not find any tracker, however when you enter the community we use the plugin wpforum that makes calls to Google fonts.
The link to Microsoft is to a tool called Clarity which is an open source tool I can’t share the link because I’m a new user and I can’t post more than 2, you can search for it, Microsoft Clarity GitHub will appear. and does not save user information, why do we use it? As I said before, we are a small, very small team, most of us work at Midori, others are providing support and making requests and/or talking with communities. This means we need to know how to improve, only one person has access to the platform and he. This platform does not reveal sensitive data about any user, it only shows us the hot zones to improve our website, something we are working on, a little slowly but we are moving forward.
I think I have answered your questions but if you have more here I will be willing to answer each question no matter how long it takes 
Midori Browser Android 3.000.6 appears to be a DuckDuckGo fork, which is different from the GeckoView reference browser source code you published:
You’re writing a lot of words to downplay these severe issues.
I’m not going to respond to this any further.
I didn’t say it was malicious, I said it was a library for crash reporting and they just gave me the name, its name is ACRA. IT WAS IN THE PASS (A LONG TIME AGO 2020, 2021)
In the README of our code we directly express that we are based on Gecko/Floorp.
I’m not trying to avoid anything, I’m not arguing either, I’m making our points. and answering your questions.
I’m not saying it’s difficult, I’m saying it’s a long process but we will do it.
We are not looking to argue with the community or with anyone, on the contrary, we want to work together with as many communities and users as possible, please do not be hostile, we are here in peace in search of improving whatever needs to be improved.
In the thread I just announced that we are working to switch to Gecko, But now that you are there you will not find any tracker or anything malicious, that I can assure and guarantee, what’s more, if you find something in the Midori applications and in the versions, if you find something, I guarantee that you will abandon the project.
IT IS A PROMISE
@Astian
Why do you not have a fdroid repo for android midori
The target group you want to address tend to use fdroid more and the playstore less
This “search engine” seems to be nothing but a Google CSE and even contacts cse.google.com directly. This is irrefutable. No wonder you haven’t uploaded the source code. Where is the added value or privacy?
Cut the act. You know exactly what you’re doing with this and the fact you’ve attempted to defend this is laughable
Midori is in F-droid but we disconnected the repository but with the migration to Geckoview we will activate it again. And Midori will be back on F-Droid
We are working on it and we are improving it little by little, we are creating our own index using the old Cliqz technology and its engineering and its engine.
Let’s offer an apology, we didn’t defend it but we sincerely apologize, we will improve.
This egregious behaviour has been going on for over two years:
Why claim ads from search results that aren’t yours (they’re Google’s) when anything special that you do isn’t ready? Why collect data from your users with analytics scripts if this is supposedly temporary?
An apology means nothing. Take astiango down now until you finish it if you want to retain any shred of integrity (on the subject of search, the other problems are another matter). How do you expect anyone to trust you?
