this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

There's a hype around floorp right now. Certainly because it's new and it offers a high level of aesthetic customization.

Unfortunately it doesn't work for me because:

  1. it takes up too much RAM compared to others. Even though people don't really care about that on modern machine it goes against my philosophy.

  2. I've been tweaking Firefox for a long time to get the highest privacy possible but it was extremely painful and I don't want to redo that with floorp.

  3. my system look is extremely minimalist and I remove any visual effects in apps I use which would go against the point of floorp.

These are some reasons why I went with librewolf since it was released in 2020. It's efficient, well maintained, kept up to date with the latest Firefox version, and most importantly to me: deeply respectful of your privacy. Their privacy approach is very well explained in the FAQ It passed all the EFF tests better than any browser I've tested after hours of tweaks.

This is only my personal experience and preference. Per the Floorp developer himself privacy is not given the utmost care and users should prefer librewolf in that regard. If you want to use normal privacy and excellent Firefox derivatives, with no doubts, floorp will fit your needs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

highest privacy possible but it was extremely painful and I don't want to redo that with floorp.

Uhm... policies or user.js? Look at arkenfox, create an override, use their updater. Dont do about:config changes on your own. You can just copy-paste that user.js into the floorp profile.

Policies are also nice, mozilla has good documentation.

Floorp being based off ESR is the downside of all the fancy GUI tweaks, just like with Thunderbird. Would not want to use that. Like, JXL is already working in regular Firefox with the right build arguments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yep, I've been through the user.js path and librewolf is also using it so I don't have to do it manually anymore. But there's more tweaks than that to reach a high level of privacy and I couldn't pass it until I found librewolf who integrates them.
I'm fine with librewolf policies and I like their general philosophy as well which is important to me as well when chosing an app.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yes, Librewolf is basically Arkenfox. I made a project fixing Arkenfox for me.

https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/Arkenfox-softening

It is probably not that well maintained and the general arkenfox stuff is not easy to deal with it, very overcomplex.

But basically you want to keep track of the updates but still override the things you like.

So arkenfox sucks in many ways, it is extremely "I hate mozilla" opinionated to a level where version update "whats new" dialogs are completely impossible. I would highly prefer a compartimentalized set of settings, but maintenance is hard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Have you seen the mercury fork? it looks more aligned to your philosophy. I've tried it, and it seems very interesting. I'm not using it just because they're often a few versions behind mainline, but it's on my watchlist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks for sharing. I've not been sold by the info on their website. Too many details are missing. At a glance, privacy concerns seem better addressed by librewolf. Also there have been some issues in update history cycles and some reviews (which I won't cite here with respect to project) didn't help in building confidence.