Floorp.

ybjrepnfr

i know there's two other threads already mentioning this newish japanese firefox-forked browser, but i chose to create this new thread rather than add this post to those, coz i'm not trying to flog the dead horse about vivaldi "should change its engine" etc. instead, i merely wanted to mention some initial thoughts about this bodily-function-noise-named browser, then sit back & learn from others' own thoughts on this browser.

it's in the AUR [arch user repository], & its pkgbuild details looked innocuous to me, so i installed it for an evaluation last night
some reviews i'd read of it implied that some users might be overwhelmed by its settings / preferences, but given my use & love of kde plasma, vivaldi, firefox nightly with user.js etc, imo too many options are just never enough!
the single biggest feature of it i was most interested in testing was its option for vertical tabs. unlike older reviews & screenshots of it that showed the dumbness of the default horizontal tab bar remaining visible when vertical tabs were invoked, this current version is more sophisticated & sensibly hides the H when you activate the V.
the vertical tab strip is utterly underwhelming, imo. certainly vivaldi has nothing to fear here, & for that matter, neither do the devs behind the firefox addons treestyletab and sidebery. it has no tab nesting/stacking capability at all, afaict*. such a primitive deployment surely could only ever appeal to naive users who are clueless about the easily available better alternatives?
initially i thought its tabs also had no thumbnail capability at all. whilst that does seem true wrt hovering, i discovered by accident that a tiny thumbnail does appear whilst one is dragging a tab to move it... it is unclear to me how that is a useful behaviour, but the fact that the devs were able to conjure tab thumbnails "dynamically" implies to me presumably they should also be able to do so "statically". not doing so, afaict, seems a pretty weird design decision.
the UI is very very "busy", with bars top & bottom, strips/columns left & right. minimalists will be appalled, & immediately reach for their css. iirc some of these might be able to be disabled in settings, but by this time, given the tabs disappointment, i'd pretty much lost all interest.
~~some reviews mentioned, or opined, that this browser was fast. it absolutely did not feel that way to me.~~
nice little touches were native settings to auto-collapse the vertical tab strip into a narrow bar that auto-expands on hover; also auto-hiding bookmarks bar that reveals on hover.

overall, i felt unable to persuade myself that this browser, at least in its current state of development, has a convincing use-case. maybe its purpose was little more than a proof-of-concept for the japanese tech students whose child it is?

* oh, i just realised! i only tried to stack them via drag & drop, but i forgot to also try just selecting multiple tabs then seeing if a stack/group option appeared in the context menu. rats, i need to go retest it... but it's on my main pooter in the frigid antarctic wasteland of my dark cold study, whereas i'm soaking up nice winter sun warmth in my sunroom, so... meh.

ybjrepnfr

@ybjrepnfr looked again. nope, no magic new context menu items appear for stacking, when multiple tabs are selected. too bad, how sad, never mind.

barbudo2005

@ybjrepnfr

Don't try to find something better than Vivaldi. Forget it, it doesn't exist.

You will always be disappointed, I assure you.

ybjrepnfr

This post is deleted!

ybjrepnfr

@barbudo2005 said in Floorp.:

better than Vivaldi. Forget it, it doesn't exist

i shall now move this tab into one of my infinitely-nestable tab-stacks in my tab-tree. oh, no, wait...

alright then, i'll cheer myself up by streaming from my fav site that only fully unlocks via cname-uncloaking in uBO. oh, no, wait...

no wukkas, i'll do a spot more interwebz browsing of my fav news websites, knowing i've marked their cookies for session-only, then close & relaunch v, inspect the list of stored cookies, & oh nooooo, why are all those ones still there?

if only i had some alternative that is free of all those problems...

barbudo2005

@ybjrepnfr

Vivaldi is not perfect, but it is the closest thing I have always dreamed of that should be a browser.

npro

I didn't pay enough attention to Floorp mostly because of the... negativ-ish review here but having installed it right now I say it looks pretty good actually! Lots of stuff found in Vivaldi there (native Notes, workspaces, a customizable translator, more keyboard shortcuts et. al ) and lots of nice and subtle stuff still to discover (like menu icons ). Looks like it tries to do with Firefox what Vivaldi did on top of Chromium, and from what I've seen so far it already succeeds (more features and more cohesively integrated, like the customizable sidebar). It could definitely be a replacement to Firefox for me and I'm going to play further with it for sure (since an escape plan from Google's Chromium increasing attrocities must always be there)

ybjrepnfr

@npro the idiot who created this thread & wrote that ridiculous first post should be excoriated, embarrassed & excluded for her egregious effrontery.

in fact, contrary to that odious OP, i have played extensively with floorp & was so impressed, after initially [clearly] overlooking its numerous fine attributes, that in fact it's been my daily default browser since early october. it's no lie to say that it is delighting me.

as a fyi for anyone who wants to install it as a flatpak, do NOT try to do so via the kde app discover [i dunno but expect the GUI app store apps of other distros might be similarly disadvantaged]. trying it that way will only offer you floorp lightning, which is a silly "lite" version of the browser with LOTS of its goodies entirely removed. instead, browse to the flathub site then opt for manual installation in terminal, wherein you get offered both versions, & so you pick the non-lightning one to get the wonderful full version [that's what i did in some VMs, as a test]. alternatively i installed it in my "real" archlinux via the AUR.

i have eschewed floorp's native vertical tabs coz they're too primitive for my tastes [so at least the OP got one thing right, sheesh], & am using treestyletabs [+ several of its companion addons]. i'm using & loving floorp's native notes, workspaces, autohidden bookmarks bar, & especially its obviously vivaldi-inspired side-panel, in which i have added similar web-panels as in my vivaldi, & thus just like vivaldi gives me the transformative browsing UX... without the blight of chromium!

i've configured multiple profiles in it, same as in my firefox-nightly & vivaldi, but floorp has the advantage over ff of providing a dedicated profile switcher button [like chromium/vivaldi] which i suspect might just be an integration of the old 3rd-party addon except that always misbehaved badly for me in firefox & firefox-nightly whereas this floorp button is rock-solid reliable.

all "serious" vivaldi users / lovers know one of vivaldi's many strengths is its deeply granular settings. on this score i expect any vivaldian who looks into floorp will be similarly pleased with their exploration of its settings. tbh, they're amazing! several of its sections inherit the vanilla firefox names, but with many extra functions included. as well, they've created other, brand new, sections to give users even more control. the "hidden" cherry on top is that in the section about:preferences#design there's a button under the Firefox Photon・Lepton UI style option called Lepton Settings.... when you click that, a new page opens that's bursting at the seams with so many nifty options for tweaking the UI. whilst it's true that hardcore firefox users can do some of these via their cunning user.js, userChrome.css & userContent.css modifications, having them & more available directly in the browser settings UI via clicks is brilliant for convenience!

tldr: floorp is simply magnificent, even allowing for the fact that it's such a young browser with a tiny dev team.

if i eventually catch up with the idjit who wrote that OP i'm gonna severely tell her off, with copious sarcasm, possibly also intense irony; what a dweeb she is... shirley. if she doesn't have the fortitude to fully remove her grossly misleading OP, she should at least have the decency to strike it out.

npro

@ybjrepnfr said in Floorp.:

she should at least have the decency to strike it out.

looks like she has already done that

it's been my daily default browser since early october.

. I thought it was frankly impossible for something to dethrone your beloved Nightly , what an achievement . Seems like we are on the same boat then (and have similar taste -but we already know this- ), cool .

am using treestyletabs [+ several of its companion addons].

no Sidebery? Interesting.

I'm using & loving floorp's native notes, workspaces, autohidden bookmarks bar, & especially its obviously vivaldi-inspired side-panel, in which i have added similar web-panels as in my vivaldi, & thus just like vivaldi gives me the transformative browsing UX... without the blight of chromium!

My thoughts and words exactly

but floorp has the advantage over ff of providing a dedicated profile switcher button [like chromium/vivaldi] which i suspect might just be an integration of the old 3rd-party addon except that always misbehaved badly for me in firefox & firefox-nightly whereas this floorp button is rock-solid reliable.

the "hidden" cherry on top is that in the section about:preferences#design there's a button under the Firefox Photon・Lepton UI style option called Lepton Settings.... when you click that, a new page opens that's bursting at the seams with so many nifty options for tweaking the UI. whilst it's true that hardcore firefox users can do some of these via their cunning user.js, userChrome.css & userContent.css modifications, having them & more available directly in the browser settings UI via clicks is brilliant for convenience!

very nice indeed, thx, lots of yummy "food" to discover with Floorp

ybjrepnfr

@npro said in Floorp.:

very nice indeed, thx, lots of yummy "food" to discover with Floorp

you're most welcome. how lucky we are to have another fine browser option!

no Sidebery? Interesting.

ah. yes. this is a slightly sore spot for me, unfortunately. as you know, i really like tst, but i like sidebery even more. hence, my initial experiments with floorp included installing sidebery... but it went really badly wrong [eg, frequently when starting floorp, multiple windows would spawn, only one being my proper one, & the others being individual tabs from history. It was so weird & annoying. other times even my proper one was gone, so i had to recover by restoring a recent sidebery snapshot (it can be configured to save sessions, at user-specified intervals)].

from doing a post-mortem on that initial experiment i suspected that maybe sidebery's own features were clashing with floorp's equivalent functions, specifically maybe:

sidebery's alternative tab panels with floorp's workspaces
sidebery's snapshots with floorp's workspaces backups

so i built a new profile in which i disabled floorp's native workspaces, & just relied on sidebery for everything [like i do in nightly as well, btw]. that profile worked, & works, really well... yay!

for a couple of weeks, that was my daily floorp arrangement, & i definitely enjoyed it. however, a little voice in the back of my head nagged me that it'd be nice to be able to use those yummy floorp native workspaces. given i did not wish to repeat the unpleasant window spawning nonsense of before, & knowing that floorp explicitly recommends tst...

Spoiler

...i built another new profile, this time omitting sidebery & replacing it with tst & helpers. that's been my default profile ever since, tis the one i'm drafting this post in now, & my vivaldi forum tab sits in one of my three native workspaces, all hunky dory sweet peas lovely.

and yet... that damn nagging voice again... last night, it persuaded me to try one more experiment with sidebery, so i created another new profile ~~[that burned down, fell over, & sank into the swamp]~~. this time i modified my usual sidebery configuration in two important ways [hoping ofc to avoid all conflict with floorp's native workspaces]:

snapshots disabled
alternative tab panels disabled

aggravatingly this experiment also failed:

unlike tst, none of sidebery's tabs obey the floorp workspaces separation; perversely they each appear in each workspace, thus entirely defeating the value of having individual workspaces.
when i was in either of the secondary workspaces, & i'd close a tab therein, it insanely deleted that entire workspace as well. gaaaah!

i'd really hoped this experiment had succeeded, as i'd love to use sidebery instead of tst, but for some reason, whereas tst is fully compatible with floorp, this is the second time i've found that IF i've created more than one floorp workspace, sidebery is unusable [otoh, with only a single workspace, sidebery works just fine]. my current preference though IS to be able to use floorp's native workspaces, ergo... it has to be tst not sidebery for me.

PS: hey @npro i have a favour to ask you pls, given you're also mucking about with floorp. could you please let me know if you have deduced how to backup & restore its notes? i had assumed that this file would be the one; floorp_notes_backup.json, but when i try then copying that into another floorp instance, i still don't see ALL my notes [weirdly, nothing later than 24/10/23 is present, even though back in my main profile, when i open notes in the panel, ALL my later notes truly are there. logically this implies the proper storage place is somewhere else].

npro

@ybjrepnfr said in Floorp.:

loorp explicitly recommends tst

thx for the extensive information regarding sidebery & tst, I read that section about tst in the Settings but couldn't make anything out of it, the english used there is 10 times worse than mine

I haven't played much with Notes yet, only the basic stuff, if I find something I will report back, but... who uses backups anyway ?

ybjrepnfr

@WildEnte said in Vivaldi not listed in Linux Mint Software Manager but "all" other browsers are:

Linux Mint Cinnamon ... Software Manager lists ... Floorp

huzzah!

Catweazle

If you want a feature rich browser which have some functions of Vivaldi, but as a Firefox fork, there exist only one I know, the recently released (last month, even its new homepage has still some Lorem ipsum parts ) new Midori browser, which has switched to the Gecko engine. I use it now as second browser instead of Firefox, because it is way better. Very nice one.
It was really a re-launch of an old, very outdated browser, disattended since 5 years, originally with the WebKit and later also with Chromium. Now with Gecko and I can say that they have made a great work, and the most similar to Vivaldi, at least in part, with a Gecko engine.

npro

@Catweazle said in Floorp.:

new Midori browser

well basically this is Floorp with a "Midori" Home background instead

(previous text: a Floorp reskin)

ybjrepnfr

@Catweazle said in Floorp.:

If you want a feature rich browser which have some functions of Vivaldi, but as a Firefox fork, there exist only one I know

what a peculiar thing to say. what do you think this thread is entirely about?

Catweazle

@npro, no, it isn't, I think it's way more than a simple reskin, with a lot of features more than Floorp.

npro

@Catweazle

stilgarwolf

@npro and more...

npro

@stilgarwolf I love "spot the difference" games, later I will search for that page in Floorp

/edit: well I think I need Sherlock Holmes' help here, this is nowhere to be found in Midori 11...

stilgarwolf

@npro The page is from Portmaster firewall.
Here is the page for Floorp (which I purged also), first run: