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Thoughts on new Japanese Firefox fork? (floorp.app)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There's this new browser built on Firefox that seems to be picking up steam on GitHub lately.

It looks like it's trying to be a more feature-rich, "batteries included", version of Firefox with hardening out of the box.

Has anyone used it? What do you think about it?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Its great and has a lot of potential, I like a lot of what it does. I just wish they had packaging easily available for Fedora/RHEL through a COPR or the like. Also would've preferred if they used a stable release vs. the ESR of Firefox as the base, but I can understand why.

with hardening out of the box

Floorp definitely isn't hardened out of the box in my testing. Only thing it does is seems to disable Firefox's telemetry, which is nice, but more hardening is certainly needed through other projects like Arkenfox (which work here on Floorp too). Also looks like Floorp makes it easier to toggle some privacy settings that you'd usually have to tweak the about:config for, and comes pre-installed with uBlock Origin, which is great.

I think overall my only concern with Floorp will be how well and quickly the developer can keep up with updates. The track record for now looks good, but only time will tell. Besides that, this is a good and very promising project, will definitely keep an eye on it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I just wish they had packaging easily available for Fedora/RHEL through a COPR or the like

Why not get the flatpak?

Also would’ve preferred if they used a stable release vs. the ESR of Firefox as the base, but I can understand why.

Same

and comes pre-installed with uBlock Origin, which is great.

Agree 100%. I feel that FX should come with uBlock out of the box.

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

That would upset sugar daddy Google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why not get the flatpak?

Security concerns. There's a lot of debate over it, but from the research I've done, I believe the Flatpak of Firefox is less secure, since it seems to remove part of Firefox's internal sandboxing, and relies heavily on Flatpak's sandboxing.

Basically makes it easier to compromise your data within the browser (like cookies, site data, passwords, etc), but maybe harder to get to the rest of your OS.

I just prefer using the rpm of Firefox with Firejail, as that keeps Firefox's built-in sandboxing intact, while adding an extra layer similar to Flatpak to restrict it further. Best of both worlds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting. It's my understanding that flatpaks deliver the app as close as possible to the way that the developer intended. With an rpm, someone had to go and take the app from the developer and make it into an rpm, so there's an extra step there.

For sandboxing, yes, flatpak does do a really good job of that. Otherwise, apps would get sandboxed on Linux with either SELinux or AppArmor.

For security, flatpaks give you the latest version of a package and updates come in automatically, so I view them as being very secure.

Please point out any errors with my reasoning (open invitation to anyone). Thanks!