[OUTDATED POST] Floorp, a Firefox Fork with an awful name, has moved some components inside a private submodule.

Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 178 points – GitHub - Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core
github.com

Update: They just open-sourced it https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components

cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/foss@beehaw.org/t/170330

See also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/floorp-going-closed-source/52783

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I grew up in the era where open-source was just starting out and creators were giving 🖕 to big tech and naming their products wacky names.

This reminds me of that era.

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What else does it apart from rebranding firefox and getting ad revenue?

It has a few privacy features, some themes, some other stuff. Nothing significant. It kinda became popular lately, and some people started using it. But now it's proprietary, so I wouldn't use it anymore. LibreWolf is much better and open source.

It also has double sidebars so I can put tabs in one of them instead of the top of the screen and hide the titlebar without having to modify userchrome.css. That's one thing I missed from Vivaldi when I moved to Firefox.

Yeah, Vivaldi’s ability to make itself surprisingly minimal (in a clean/non-“hacky” way) is the only thing keeping me from Firefox or Librewolf right now.

If you want you can try Floorp if you'd like to use Firefox based browser. It is really customizable, although it is missing a lot of things that Vivaldi has, like split screen and tab grouping. But it has an enhanced support for tree style tabs which is a big plus in my opinion.

Yeah I’ve poked at Floorp but it’s UI mods feel kinda janky at this stage. I really like being able to turn everything off (no tab bar, address bar only when activated), and the only other browser that can do that is Orion (or maybe qutebrowser? No extensions though :/)

Are there any benefits to using LibreWolf if I'm alrrady using Arkenfox?

I believe the main thing people liked about Floorp is tab grouping and vertical tab layout à la Vivaldi, and a more modern and slim design out of the box, while keeping a firefox core instead of being another chromium based browser.

https://floorp.app/en/

nothing then? Because I don't see anything different there

Like said below, it's nothing too significant. It boasts about having two sidebars on each side and "Flexible Toolbar & Tab Bar", which according to the screenshots is TreeStyleTab + another toolbar on the right. In my opinion, that is something different. And that's what the website says.

Welp, the message you've cross-posted was since edited to include

Edit: They claim they will make that part open source too, eventually, and it is due to behavior of another browser: https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core/issues/62

Can somebody elaborate on this? How could somebody stealing their code be a problem?

Not sure about this particular case as the author didn't elaborate, but sometimes suckers sell binaries. Also, they've mentioned assets that may be non-commercial or require naming the original author which some forks may choose to ignore.

Anyways, I personally don't use floorp, so you better ask their devs or community.

Ah for fucks sake, I really liked this browser.

same, any alternative?

LibreWolf or just regular Firefox? Which unique Floorp features do you miss in Firefox?

Good sidebars and PWA's, two things Firefox will probably never add sadly.

i mostly like the layout, everything being collapsed unless you hover over it, but there prob some extension for it already

Waterfox has auto hide for different stuff and the next update brings a sidebar for vertical tabs similar to floorp (you can already enable it in about:config)

Any with vertical tabs? Floorp has them built in and it works well.

My dog loves floorp. He does it whenever he gets excited to meet someone new.

The creator of Floorp posted a reponse to this: https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/

TLDR posted by the creator: creator:

To put it simply, the current Floorp, including forks, will end the moment I stop maintaining it, so to prevent that from happening, I have prohibited forks. The idea is to solve the user's concern about code transparency by tightening the license when returning to open source, and to create a sustainable Floorp by giving them the choice of paying money or helping with the coding.

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn't need his obscure fork.

I disagree in this case. The majority of Firefox forks make it clear they're a fork, giving credit to Mozilla. Midori seems to hide that they're a fork while adding very little to the browser. Their website also takes donations while having a fake phone number and broken contact button. Hard not to see that as suspicious.

Edit: the dev was also completely ok with Firedragon switching to their codebase because they did so resepectfully.

I still disagree with what the dev did, but I get the struggle.

I agree that the Midori website is suspicious however their repo properly credits Firefox and Floorp in the very first sentence of the readme (however they don't actually link to this repo for some reason). In any case, my intent isn't to defend Midori (which I don't use or have any interest in) but rather to defend the four freedoms none of which are conditional on how much a fork adds or contributes back. In other words, it's perfectly ok to just fork something and change the name.

I still maintain it's ironic that a fork developer is complaining about forks of his fork. This statement is baffling but I suppose it comes from a proprietary mindset where copying is theft:

If these are forked, my hundreds of hours will have been wasted.

By this logic the decades of development time on Firefox is wasted because of this guy's fork.

The "open sourced" private components repo is under a fauxpen source (non-commercial) license. Floorp is still proprietary.

Not proprietary, but source-available.

source-available.

Ergo, proprietary.

edit: my prior comment on the difference between fauxpen source and true free software licenses. It's not just theoretical or "purist"

Ok sure, but most people associate proprietary with closed-source. What's wrong with just saying source-available (instead of open-source)? Calling this proprietary just leads to confusion.

Because it gives the wrong impression that it is not proprietary, just like how you are making this exact mistake.

If y'all are mad about this, look into Midori. It's a fork of florp and I think it's better, too.

From the website:

With Midori Browser you can browse the web with complete confidence and an advanced tracking blocker.

Then the next paragraph states:

Cryptotoken: To reward our users, we are organizing an initiative a Token to give users to use our products and services without tracking.

So it blocks tracking but adds more tracking, so users can buy some shitcoin to remove the tracking?

I'm glad that their forks of simple mobile tools didn't gain traction, then

What does it even do better? I remember using it right after they redid it and it was just a 1/1 copy of Floorp

Still going to use the heck out if it. It's super useful in my workflow and firefox at heart. I want to be more productive, not poorductive on some weird purist idealism.

Then you missed the point of why people do this in the first place, it's not about idealism