abarbarian Posted March 1 Share Posted March 1 (edited) Floorp: Web Browser Focusing on Privacy and Customization Quote This browser is tailored for users seeking extensive personalization options, positioning itself as a middle ground between the privacy-centric Brave and the customization-rich Vivaldi. It offers an optimal balance for those desiring advanced privacy features and extensive customization capabilities. Quote At the heart of Floorp’s design is a commitment to user privacy. The browser has a powerful tracking blocker as a default feature, shielding users from many malicious trackers prevalent across the internet. In addition, it offers fingerprinting protection, further securing users from invasive tracking techniques. Why Floorp has become the browser of my dreams Quote On a philosophical level, I also derive some small satisfaction from using a browser built on Firefox’s Gecko-rendering engine, if only because it’s nice to support an internet that’s not controlled by Google or Apple. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/floorp-bin Downloaded the AUR offering and installed floorp. Then I used the FF sync feature which I have never used before to add all my bookmarks from my present FF to it, all went well. I made a few changes to floorp, this was quite easy as it uses pretty much the same customization as FF. I must say that floorp ones up just a tad quicker than FF on my Arch set up. Web pages also seem to open up a tad quicker too. You Tube definitely opens up more speedily and there is no problems with playback. Netflix opens and plays very well, though starting a new program from the home screen does take a while to start but that happens in all the browsers I have tried so I am putting that down to a Netflix problem. Once started Netflix plays very well. From what I have gathered on the net updates are just a couple of days after the FF ESR updates. All in all from my short trial floorp seems to run very well indeed and I will be keeping it as my daily. I took some time out to customize it slightly with a new theme but could not decide on which to use. I installed a few and am using this one at present. I just like black cats with yellow eyes BlackCatCrew However these quite caught my eye A N I M A T E D KITTY CAT Eyes in the Clouds Spirited Away (Animated) Calvin & Hobbes Plus several other cat themes. This one would be perfect for Josh but it would probably burn your eyes out. Hacker (Animated) Enjoy Edited March 1 by abarbarian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crp Posted March 5 Share Posted March 5 how is the browser being funded? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 10 Share Posted March 10 I am liking this Floorp browser a lot. Tried it out a week ago and have only browsed to a handful of pages so far, but just went through the Settings and was most impressed with the extra features there compared to regular Firefox-ESR. It also seems fast and very responsive. On one site for which I have issues in FF lately (probably due to the stupid amount of about:config customisations I have done) it works perfectly. Also works way better than Chromium for that site! I haven't installed any extra extensions yet as Floorp already includes uBlock Origin and tracking protection, and I will use the default FF cookie manager instead of AutoCookieDelete which I have in standard FF. May add a couple like BehindTheOverlay and Context Search. I wrote a little .desktop file so it is added to the menu. This is for those not using Arch AUR (probably) and who download the tarball and extract and run it from ~/bin which I would suggest to be optimal; it doesn't interfere with your distro version. Just create a floorp.desktop file in /home/<username>/.local/share/applications with this content: [Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=Floorp Browser Exec=/home/<username>/bin/floorp/floorp Icon=/home/<username>/bin/floorp/browser/chrome/icons/default/default32.png Categories=Internet Obviously replace <username> with your actual username. Two thumbs up for Floorp! 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 11 Author Share Posted March 11 21 hours ago, sunrat said: I am liking this Floorp browser a lot. Me too. I think it is a tad quicker than FF and the customizing stuff is neat too.Glad you like it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 12 Author Share Posted March 12 Something very strange is going on with floorp on my new Arch set up. It was running tickety boo. Then I made a few changes in the settings and it would not load up any web pages. They start to load and then just keep on loading, just like if you had a slow connection, but they never ever complete. Apart from updates to add-ons. No-Script had an update and automatically opened up a web page so did Privacy Badger. No Idea what is going wrong , uninstalled and re installed to no effect. So I had to install FireFox which works just as it should. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 12 Share Posted March 12 @abarbarian I would guess a conflict between built in features and add-ons. Particularly PrivacyBadger as Floorp has its own tracker protection. Did you try deleting profile at ~/.floorp or creating a new profile? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 13 Author Share Posted March 13 15 hours ago, sunrat said: @abarbarian I would guess a conflict between built in features and add-ons. Particularly PrivacyBadger as Floorp has its own tracker protection. Did you try deleting profile at ~/.floorp or creating a new profile? That did the trick. Deleted Privacy Badger and all is well again. Whilst I was trouble shooting (waiting for someone to give me the solution) I installed FF and I can definitely say that floorp is faster to load up and run than FF. Maybe not by much but a noticeable difference. I used FF Sync feature for the first time ever to swap over my bookmarks, found it a pretty neat way to do that. Is it advisable to keep logged in or should I log out and just login when I need to sync to another browser ?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 13 Share Posted March 13 4 hours ago, abarbarian said: That did the trick. Deleted Privacy Badger and all is well again. Whilst I was trouble shooting (waiting for someone to give me the solution) I installed FF and I can definitely say that floorp is faster to load up and run than FF. Maybe not by much but a noticeable difference. I used FF Sync feature for the first time ever to swap over my bookmarks, found it a pretty neat way to do that. Is it advisable to keep logged in or should I log out and just login when I need to sync to another browser ?? Amazing, my theory worked! I think the Sync feature works by saving your data in the cloud so once you set up Sync on one FF you can just open another and log in to Sync and it will download all your settings. I haven't done it with Floorp yet but would probably only want bookmarks, and skip history and add-ons. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 13 Author Share Posted March 13 1 hour ago, sunrat said: Amazing, my theory worked! I think the Sync feature works by saving your data in the cloud so once you set up Sync on one FF you can just open another and log in to Sync and it will download all your settings. I haven't done it with Floorp yet but would probably only want bookmarks, and skip history and add-ons. I delete everything at close of play apart from bookmarks. I guess I will just log in every now and again as I never like to stay logged in on any site permanently. An yes you are now an official geeky guru Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted May 18 Share Posted May 18 From the latest version release notes: Quote Later this year, Ablaze plans to launch a number of initiatives to help maintain the health of the browser and generate revenue from its software in a way that doesn’t compromise user privacy. Who coulda seen that coming? Even Blind Freddie I reckon! Also : Quote Floorp’s codebase has undergone a significant refactoring to enhance its clarity and maintainability All of Floorp’s content scripts have been rewritten in ESM (ECMAScript Modules). Floorp is also in the process of cleaning up its codebase to move from an ESR (Extended Support Release) to a Rapid Release model. Coming soon - Not ESR any more. I have Floorp, FF-ESR, and FF 126.0 installed currently. And Chromium. Considering ditching Floorp if it's monetising and just do some tweaks to FF 126. I've only really been using Floorp for one website which is not working in FF-ESR and that's likely because of all the tweaks I have done. I can't work out which tweak is the culprit - it just makes Google login fail. Note to self - document all the tweaks in future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted May 23 Author Share Posted May 23 On 5/18/2024 at 3:32 AM, sunrat said: Who coulda seen that coming? Even Blind Freddie I reckon! Not quite what it seems. Preparing for a New Beginning for Floorp Quote The solution has already been found and I am working on getting some of the Floorp code ready to be released as Open-source LICENSE. I know most of our users are concerned about the transparency of the code. (Just a note, I allow the use of the code if the fork is not malicious. In fact, I allowed FireDragon to use the code for free. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 Update:- I have now abandoned Floorp in favour of Librewolf. It seems to be free of one minor glitch I had on one site which is practically the only site I use it for. And Librewolf has a proper Debian repository so updates happen along with normal system updates rather than the background process that Floorp uses. I'm also contemplating replacing Debian default Firefox-ESR with the current upstream version now that Firefox also has a proper Debian repo. Could be a slow transition as I have done so much customisation in FF-ESR. Main factor there is that current Firefox now has an offline translation feature which seems to work well and is less clumsy than using an extension. I visit a couple of German sites occasionally. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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