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.
Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
61–70 of 203 posts
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#62I 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.
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
believe me the French are very, very proud of their country, that doesn't really mean you need to buy into rather cringy economic 'patriotism'. Especially when it makes zero sense as in the case of software. It's not like this browser came out of a 500 year old artisanal Japanese crafting shop, where the browser recipes where handed down the family tree With these kinds of things it's basically, I have no way to diff…
You were probably fortunate to live in the better part of France :) In many parts of France, simply displaying the French flag in front of your house is very dangerous, whereas it is perfectly normal for everywhere else.
Neither in Spain. Its quite provocative if you do
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#64What'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.
I hear their TV sets actually look like a cloudy sky when they're tuned to a dead channel.
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#65What'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.
This is purely personal opinion and I can only cite a couple of examples off the cuff, but I have noticed some Japanese authors can have an affinity for avoiding bloat. Whether this is intentional I do not know, but they seem comfortable writing relatively small, concise software.
(Now, this being HN I'm sure someone will cite some counter examples.)
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#66For 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.…
Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( 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) ), the browser engine that is at the heart of Firefox to create the Goanna browser engine ( 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/ ) though no browser application has been built on it yet.
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#67Seeing 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), a…
But is it written in Rust?
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#68For 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.…
Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( 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) ), th…
Gotta admit, being able to actually customize the UI/theme like the old days is awfully tempting. God I miss "Night Launch".
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#69I'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 basicall…
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.
Re: Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
#70I'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 basicall…
> Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together?
Could they, though? What if upstream says ”thanks, but no thanks“ to your ideas? What if there are multiple, equally valid solutions to a problem, and you want to explore one that wasn‘t chosen?
Progress isn‘t linear, and not everything can be compromised on.
Just having more people work on a project, does not magically speed up development. You need leadership, a common goal, consensus, and focus.
If all these projects merged their efforts, that would probably result in a lot of lengthy discussions and infighting, rather than improvements.