I just learned about it yesterday. Seems like Vivaldi but on gecko, which I always wanted to see.
Unfortunately it seems like it’s maintained by only one overworked dev. It needs more funding and more devs.
The most similar, not to say identical to floorp, is Midori. Other which try to recreate old Opera is Otter (Qt5, not Gecko), also nice, private, FOSS and blazing fast.
Midori seems pretty shady. I remember it as a super minimalistic browser, but now it seems like they are straight up taking someone elses work and just changing the name and sponsor links within. I tried it and it seems like 1:1 copy of floorp.
What I said, anyway try also Otter, even if it isn’t a Gecko browser (AFAIK it also admits in last versions the import of Chrome extensions (Qt5 is a fork of Blink), also userscripts without the need of Tamper, Greay or Violentmonkey). It will be also the fastest browser you ever have tested.
I did try Otter in the past when I was looking for the Opera replacement, never really liked it. It seems like it’s pretty dead…last update was 2 years ago. And speed was never really my priority for the browser anyways. I’m not really looking to replace my browser, I’m happy with Vivaldi, I just like to check what else is there. I was happy to see that there is a browser based on gecko that seems to be going in the similar direction as Vivaldi.
AFAIK it’s maintained by a group called Ablaze and I think I saw them mention they are university students and opensource enthusiasts in Github discussions.
There are blog posts on their site about changes to their team and leadership. Their blog is in Japanese but I just translate it with Firefox’s inbuilt translator. So I don’t think it’s a single dev.
It’s an interesting attempt to replicate Vivaldi’s functionality in a Firefox fork. Unfortunately it retains the horrible printing experience of Firefox.
Seems like a good browser. The only issue is how maintained will it be. Also, librewolf has been released and maintained properly and is proven time and time again. Not sure how different it is from LW.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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