Looks like Floorp in relation to Firefox is the same as Vivaldi in relation to Chrome: a fork aimed at power users with a native support for vertical tabs. Will keep an eye on it. Meanwhile, I spend several minutes trying to create a new workspace and failed to do it. It's ok, will definitely give Floorp another try when it transitions from Beta to a stable release.
Looking at the 4 team members referenced in the different thread [0], we can tell they are a team of 4 people, one of them are university student and 3 high school students. Maybe we shouldn't bash them too badly and instead encourage them tempering around and contribute to open source more in the future?
Funding them would be better than funding Mozilla's CEO, they won't give Firefox much attention and we users donate to them for Firefox and they use our money to do boring (dead) projects ?
Seeing some talk about "built in Japan": This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. AFAICT, pride is a main constituent. There is a strong desire for Japanese to have accomplishments to be proud of to the world, to stand out on a crowded world stage.
Another is this phrase particularly signals to other Japanese: Hey, choose this software, because it was made by our kind (pride), and its operation might mesh better with your cognitive patterns. oh, and the Japanese localization is bound to be 1st class (a small rarity).
One more: Japanese like to judge things after getting the thing into their hands and evaluating it (物で判断する), and word-of-mouth is mighty powerful in Japan. So "built in Japan" means it's pre-vetted by Japanese, and that is in turn a powerful seal of quality. Oh, and if there are some flaws, we can overlook them knowing that someone will eventually get round to dealing with them. It's a civil and respectful community-minded approach that mirrors Japanese culture in the large.
If you are so inclined, there is a whole multi-faceted Made in Japan movement.
Outside of the context of Japan or being of a Japanese mind, the value of this statement depends greatly on the context. For medicine, semiconductors, industrial equipment? Made in Japan is often a solid choice. For software? Japan is an advanced nation, plenty of highly-skilled knowledge workers, and has a very long history with software development; this software is probably competently done. On the other hand, it might mean the software is designed a little .. mysterious .. to non-Japanese eyes due to those aforementioned cognitive patterns but also a differing cultural context. For example using the color blue to signify "build successful" in Jenkins instead of green.
Well I must be part of the exception then. I am not proud of anything I have not directly contributed to. Feeling proud for other people achievements is very strange to me.
I mean, you aren't one in a million rare, but it should be fairly obvious from the existence of sports fans that pride over other's accomplishments is very much a common trait.
My guess is you are taking a narrower view of this than you intend? People don't necessarily take personal pride in what others have done. But identity is both personal and societal. And any accomplishment of identity is something that people are likely to feel pride in.
That is, pride is often tied to identity. And identity has a pretty wide brush.
It's just an extension of society in general. I live in a neighbourhood, I am a member of the community. I am proud of my neighbourhood even though I am not directly responsible for everything positive within it. Same principle scales all the way up to countries. It's a way of bringing people together (see: national sports teams). Nationalism is, uh, not without its downsides. But the motivations are pretty clear.
It's tribalism and it's not going to be 100% present in every individual, but it's still pretty prevalent in humans. It's a neutral concept and I hope has more upside than downside, depends on the situation I guess.
I assume you don't feel shame for things your fellow humans have done either? Anyway everyone is different, but I'm talking about neurotypical people mostly.
Interesting, I’m surprised that you think the average person feels shame over the actions of bad people. I would have said sadness in sympathy to the victims and disgust for the bad person
I would be surprised if most people don't feel some shame when a sibling or other close relative does something bad?
Heck, most of us are effectively different people than we were in the past. And we very much feel some shame when we find out something bad we did back when.
The statement that I was replying to was about feeling shame for actions by other humans anywhere, anytime. I think there is goal post movement in your response.
Do you feel shame when you read about someone stealing a bike in a far country whose capital you wouldn’t know ? You must be in despair over all the crimes committed by humanity every hour
I am merely pointing at the trivial connections to others. Hinting at the idea that any line in the sand between you and others that you will feel an identity with is a line you will draw. That others will draw it somewhere else should be no surprise.
Do I also think it is arbitrary? Yeah. But I am also ok not feeling shame at stupid crap my immediate family has done. I just have no surprise that others do.
There's obviously a big difference between your own kid and some other kid. When my own kids do something terrible, I'm obviously going to reflect on whether I did something wrong as well when I raised and educated them and hence might be ashamed of that. But why would I be ashamed when my neighbor's kids murdered someone?
Look up "Han Unification" - Unicode reuses codepoints for characters from Chinese and Japanese (also traditional Korean, but those characters aren't really used in modern Korean so it's much less of an issue), even though these characters actually look quite different. So any given font will look wrong in either China or Japan. Since China is the larger market, almost all "international" applications plump for a font that looks right in China and wrong in Japan.
As someone who has worked a lot with CJK in Unicode, I can not support the sentiment that Unicode uniquely screws Japanese. You'll always have to use an appropriate font for the task, the encoding won't help you. Yes, the idea of "Han Unification" was somewhat naive and even questionable, and one might ask whether it is still being applied to new codepoints, and there are some weirdities in CJK encoding (but those apply across all concerned languages and are not unique to Japanese).
Then again, it is a difficult taks. For example, there are three ways to write the first (topmost) stroke of 言: as a slanted dot (now PRC standard), as a short vertical (very common in pre-war prints, still used in Japan) or as a short horizontal (also very common). Sure, one can make three codepoints out of these, no big deal. But then 言 occurs in a gazillion of other characters, as in 說這語信 and so on; all of these characters would then need to get codepoints of their own (which btw is exactly what happened with 說 vs 説 (and incidentally 说)). It gets worse when you consider that another one or two components of a given character may also have two or three variants, then you might get 3x2=6 or 3x2x3=18 codepoints for what most people consider a single character. And did I mention we already have around 100'000 codepoints for CJK Ideographs? That number would multiply considerably.
Although I've worked extensively on these problems—what is a variant, what deserves a codepoint—all I've found that there can and should be guidelines, but there's no very hard and fast rule. And I'm afraid variant selectors are a cop-out, not a solution.
> You'll always have to use an appropriate font for the task, the encoding won't help you.
In practice in the pre-unicode world fonts were encoding-specific, so the encoding did help. When you viewed a Japanese document it would be in a Japanese encoding and you'd get a Japanese font, when you viewed a Chinese document it would be in a Chinese encoding and you'd get a Chinese font, and when you mixed up your encodings you'd get something that was obviously broken even to someone doesn't speak Chinese or Japanese.
> but those apply across all concerned languages and are not unique to Japanese
They're de facto unique to Japanese; Chinese support "won" in most international contexts, so "CJK" codepoints look fine in Chinese, and those codepoints are rarely used in Korean (mainly in historical documents) so having them rendered "wrong" there matters less in everyday life. Admittedly looking at another article that hit HN today I could believe Bulgaria gets equally shafted (and is probably, sadly, less capable of sustaining a "made in Bulgaria" software ecosystem than Japan is).
> Sure, one can make three codepoints out of these, no big deal. But then 言 occurs in a gazillion of other characters, as in 說這語信 and so on; all of these characters would then need to get codepoints of their own (which btw is exactly what happened with 說 vs 説 (and incidentally 说)). It gets worse when you consider that another one or two components of a given character may also have two or three variants, then you might get 3x2=6 or 3x2x3=18 codepoints for what most people consider a single character. And did I mention we already have around 100'000 codepoints for CJK Ideographs? That number would multiply considerably.
You don't have to add 18 variants, only 3, and that's the worst case. We don't need codepoints for letters that are half-Japanese half-Korean, or every other conceivable variant. But using Unicode shouldn't be a regression from using Shift-JIS.
> In practice in the pre-unicode world fonts were encoding-specific, so the encoding did help
Nobody wants to go back to a world with hundreds of relevant and thousands of legacy encodings.
> when you mixed up your encodings you'd get something that was obviously broken even to someone doesn't speak Chinese or Japanese.
Obviously much better when nobody can read anything than forcing some people to read texts where there's the occasional odd ('non-native' if you exaggerate a bit) font style choice.
> We don't need codepoints for letters that are half-Japanese half-Korean, or every other conceivable variant
Things are more complicated than that, I'm afraid. For one thing there's time, so setting the language in your HTML document or element to Japanese will give what is considered correct in Japanese today, not what was considered correct pre-war or any one time before that. There's no formal way to express that. Second, stylistic choices on one and language + region selector on the other are cross-cutting concerns.
I have to say that I find your criticism not very well founded. What you can do today is (taking HTML+CSS as the obvious choice) is proper font choice, `@font-face` declarations, proper downloadable fonts, proper configuration of OpenType font feature flags, if necessary on the basis of Unicode code point ranges. (There's also Unicode variation selectors, bit I've never worked with those so can't say how well those work.) This will get you a long, long way to achieving correct and typographically pleasing output for any text be it Chinese traditional or simplified, Japanese, or Korean. It is some work, but then it is a vexing and somewhat convoluted problem, too. I think one should give font designers more credit here because good CJK fonts typically go to great lengths to satisfy even the finickier type heads among us, enabling variations that I'd frankly just gloss over for heavens sake.
It's not like the pre-Unicode chaos of mutually incompatible encodings did anything to help you with any of these points. Rather, it locked you into a rather small (when compared to Unicode) set of codepoints, and you typically only could do one setting per document. So, no writing about Cuneiform or Hieroglyphs in Japanese. Today we can intermingle LTR and RTL scripts, and you can freely mix hundreds of scripts in a single document and a single encoding. None of that was possible in the good old days.
> Nobody wants to go back to a world with hundreds of relevant and thousands of legacy encodings.
Japan does (assuming agreeing a unicode-like encoding that actually worked is off the table), for the simple reason that practical support for Japanese in "international" applications has regressed since those days.
> Obviously much better when nobody can read anything than forcing some people to read texts where there's the occasional odd ('non-native' if you exaggerate a bit) font style choice.
> What you can do today is (taking HTML+CSS as the obvious choice) is proper font choice, `@font-face` declarations, proper downloadable fonts, proper configuration of OpenType font feature flags, if necessary on the basis of Unicode code point ranges. (There's also Unicode variation selectors, bit I've never worked with those so can't say how well those work.)
You can do a lot in HTML because HTML has a lot of specific support - something that would likely also be true in a world without unicode. (In the unicode world we have only one encoding per HTML file, but there's no reason a file format couldn't support multiple encodings in the same way as supporting multiple language spans etc.).
> It's not like the pre-Unicode chaos of mutually incompatible encodings did anything to help you with any of these points. Rather, it locked you into a rather small (when compared to Unicode) set of codepoints, and you typically only could do one setting per document.
The old system made the easy things easy. In those days effectively any program that could display French or Swedish documents could also display Japanese documents.
The unicode world makes some things that were previously hard easier, such as mixing languages (as long as the lanugages you want to mix aren't Japanese), but your file format has to go beyond "plain" text for the most basic functionality of properly displaying monolingual Japanese documents.
In the old days if you didn't think about languages at all your program would be broken in every non-English language. Now it's broken only in Japan. That's an improvement for most places, but it's a huge regression in Japan, because previously most programs made some effort to deal with internationalisation issues and now they don't, they just say "it's unicode so we don't have to think about it".
I think almost everything you said relies on seeing the old ways through rosy glasses and massively underestimating the daily problems that the multitude (technically, gazillions) of encoding standards and standards on how to encode encoding choices brought to the many people who already worked regularly with computers in the early 90s and before that. I'll just pick a single point I disagree with, and then comment on the one point that to me has true merit.
So you write, You can do a lot in HTML because HTML has a lot of specific support - something that would likely also be true in a world without unicode. (In the unicode world we have only one encoding per HTML file, but there's no reason a file format couldn't support multiple encodings in the same way as supporting multiple language spans etc.). Basically you reject a format—HTML+Unicode—that has seen tremendous global acceptance, that has brought us 'rich text' (to quote Microsoft), near-complete universal language support for hundreds of previously entirely unencoded writing systems, ability to display ruby text (i.e. small annotations, parallel version of text; btw. not limited to Japanese at all) and want to replace that with 'a file format [that] support[s] multiple encodings'. I agree that it would sometimes be nice (i.e. nice-to-have) inline encoding switches in HTML. You could totally write a JS method to do exactly that, right now, so go ahead! But to replace HTML+Unicode with 'some unspecified file formats' that 'could have' multiple encodings in a single file? Doesn't sound like I want to go down that particular cul de sac.
OK now on to that other point: you write your file format has to go beyond "plain" text for the most basic functionality of properly displaying [some features for some linguistic situations], if I may be so bold and generalize to avoid that fixation on "boo it's Japanese again and only Japanese that has been put at a disadvantage". So where I agree with you is that historically the Unicode consortium was too reluctant to acknowledge responsibility for some features of written text that should be expressible in the very text, not in a 'side channel' (e.g. in HTML tags). This would IMO include markers for start and end of stretches of a language, so you could write "good day, {lang=fr}Messieur{/lang}" where the curlies symbolize where Unicode control character sequences (not unlike those already used for flags) should appear. There's more stuff like that like e.g. indicating position of text relative to other text; we sort of have it in the form of CJK Ideographic Description Characters and Control Character for Ancient Egyptian, but nothing for the general purpose.
> I think almost everything you said relies on seeing the old ways through rosy glasses and massively underestimating the daily problems that the multitude (technically, gazillions) of encoding standards and standards on how to encode encoding choices brought to the many people who already worked regularly with computers in the early 90s and before that.
It's not rosy glasses lol, I have to deal with encoding differences every day. I'd like nothing more than to be able to forget about them if there was something like unicode that actually worked. Instead I watch support for the language I'm using degrade day by day because everyone high-fives each other that they've got unicode now so they've solved all the problems (and they have! As long as you're not using Japanese), and then they add insult to injury by trying to tell me it's better.
> they did screw Japanese but gave Hong Kong/Taiwan the full set of traditional characters. Though that seems politically motivated.
We don't live in a world where any part of this holds water, at least I don't. Care to elucidate where exactly HK and Taiwan got their full set but Japan didn't?
> I wonder why they couldn't have done a composition system like Hangeul?
The answer to that question is because it's too difficult. I worked a bit about automatic CJK character generation ion the early nineties, around the time Unicode v1 and then v2 came out. Nothing at the time resembled anything anywhere close to aesthetically pleasing output. Quite a number of people tried over decades, not a single paper demonstrates acceptable character shapes, only 'legible' and 'bearable' ones at most. Given recent advancements in AI text-to-image, it wouldn't surprise me if someone has already tried their hand at providing a model for CJK generation. But even then you'll be computationally much cheaper to just generate images for given code points plus those few unencoded characters that have to be generated ad-hoc.
> We don't live in a world where any part of this holds water, at least I don't. Care to elucidate where exactly HK and Taiwan got their full set but Japan didn't?
Characters from "Traditional Chinese" and "Simplified Chinese" have different codepoints even for "the same" character, whereas characters from Japanese (or old Korean) are made to share Chinese characters' codepoints even for visually different characters.
The argument relies on 'visually different' being a well-defined, binary distinction. It is not. 'Similarity' and 'dissimilarity' can at best be described for a narrow set of purposes with guiding rules. So is the exact shape of the vertical or vertically-slanted dot on top of 言 enough to trigger the dissimilarity warning, or is it only when it's written as a horizontal? How about 吉田 vs. ⿱土口田? Is that similar or dissimilar? How about that little 'hair' stroke (ヒゲ or 筆押さえ) that is sometimes seen in characters like 文? When you compare the samples shown over at http://tonan.seesaa.net/article/431481813.html, wouldn't you agree that it is quite difficult to predict which characters should and which ones shouldn't have a ヒゲ? Did you know that the JIS 1983 edition did include the ヒゲ in many characters where the JIS 1990 edition omitted it?
You'll find all the gory details of what changed between JIS encoding editions in this fine book: 大熊肇: 文字の骨組[1], esp. pp164—178 where all the fine details between different editions of the JIS encoding are listed. It's mind-boggling! It's almost as though the Japanese standards body itself has been having slightly different opinions about their own writing system over the decades. Now if you're intent on getting all the fine details just right for your print edition you can either apply a newer or older JIS encoding to your document, OR invent that file format you're talking about where you can switch encodings mid-way, OR access OpenType font features from your document somehow... mmmh... how to do that... mmmh...
Oh I know! Let's use Unicode and HTML and CSS and get full access to OpenType font features for any point in the document on a per-codepoint basis.
For those folks who really pine for the bad old days when all we had was US ASCII plus an insane number of other encodings, please do read this single Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_2022 it will change your mind.
> The argument relies on 'visually different' being a well-defined, binary distinction.
No it doesn't. Unicode has no problem with including multiple codepoints for characters that are (arguably) not visually distinct, and has already done so, many times over, not least for simplified vs traditional Chinese (but also for e.g. Cyrillic vs Latin). Just... not for Japanese.
> It's almost as though the Japanese standards body itself has been having slightly different opinions about their own writing system over the decades.
Slightly different, sure. Doesn't mean "just write it all in Chinese" is acceptable. I'm not asking for pixel-perfect everything, just for the ability to write the native everyday language of over 100 million people without having to use some half-assed out-of-band font setup that always has some funny edge case where it breaks.
> On my phone I just added Japanese as a language and it now prefers those. Windows seems to support it fine too, as does Chrome on Linux.
Is the text you're reading getting rendered in Japanese characters? Or is it getting written in similar-but-not-quite-the-same (and thus something you can use, but irritating to do so) Chinese characters?
Shift-JIS is still a pain in the ass. I recently encountered two applications that only work properly in Japanese Windows, and in any other locale will just display mojibake. And these are modern applications, made in the last year. How is that even possible in 2023?
Because most (esp. Japanese) people don't know how to use Unicode properly, or don't care. They just build without defining UNICODE and naively assume your local codepage to be CP932 because 99% of their target audience is exactly this (and hence seemingly unaffected).
Well, Unicode's Han unification process kind of screwed Japan, so that's somewhat understandable.
It makes it hard to use Unicode for historical documents with older variants, documents using more than one CJK language (like talking about Chinese in Japanese), and worst of all, a lot of theoretically-compatible CJK fonts look wrong because they chose Chinese glyphs.
There's many ways Unicode is an improvement over what came before, but they screwed up with Han unification.
> This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people.
I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets:
* those who normally favor their own country's products.
* those who almost universally loathe their own country's products.
I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world.
Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea.
Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :).
> those who almost universally loathe their own country's products.
In Indian rural side, "desi" (native) is almost always synonyms with bad quality, not cheap which is implied, but bad quality. I heard that desi in many foreign country means Indian?!
Desi or swadesi (home made) had a special emotional appeal to urban upper middle class leadership during freedom struggle. I don't know how they feel about it.
Chandrayaan from ISRO was a very significant moment in this regard. Done by desi engineers educated in desi schools. I am one of those.
As a white, vanilla American, I have always understood desi to be very similar to "hick" or "country bumpkin", but from the subcontinent. (And usually applied to people who have never been anywhere near the countryside.)
American here: I've only heard "desi" used as a self-descriptor by South Asian people, usually Indian (but I think Pakistani sometimes as well?). It doesn't carry a negative connotation here that I know of, though I might have missed one that does exist.
As an Indian-American, I've heard variations of this to describe first-gen American born Indians in a negative fashion. Sometimes, the shorthand "ABCD" is used (meaning American Born Confused Desi) to insult American Indians. This is principally used by Indians who either live in India or emigrated to the US and encounter American Indians.
(As an aside, it's rather difficult to accurately describe my ethno-national status given the regular confusion with people of the First Nations...)
There's no need to worry about confusion, Indian-American always means ancestry or origin in India. Native American is the usual term in the US for the indigenous, although many of them call themselves Indians and prefer it, a generation ago it was American Indian, but it's never been the other way around, hyphen or otherwise.
I've been trying out all the firefox forks that come out and end up back on master Firefox (on desktop, Mull wins on Android IMO) due to the inevitable limits of developer time on the project. The value proposition is never quite worth it for the downsides. A web browser is not a trivial project to build and upstream changes are unrelenting.
Just like I've seen in Linux for 20+ years, we see different tribes basically working on the same thing in slightly different ways, and I find my self thinking over and over "Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together?". Particularly with the Firefox forks where projects seem to struggle with the release cadence.
It's a rhetorical question though - effective organization appears hard to scale especially when there is no money involved. How many cash rich companies have you worked at that have lost the plot?
I would really like to see Firefox win again in the browser battles. I personally believe that its the UX where differentiation from the chromiums is opportune with many interesting and desirable new UI paradigms emerging in some the recent third-party browser upstarts.
> Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together?
Could they, though? What if upstream says ”thanks, but no thanks“ to your ideas? What if there are multiple, equally valid solutions to a problem, and you want to explore one that wasn‘t chosen?
Progress isn‘t linear, and not everything can be compromised on.
Just having more people work on a project, does not magically speed up development. You need leadership, a common goal, consensus, and focus.
If all these projects merged their efforts, that would probably result in a lot of lengthy discussions and infighting, rather than improvements.
Why forks? -- There are a lot of decisions made by the upstream that are... let's put it mildly, "opinionated" (but really, just idiotic). But you cannot argue with majority or whoever leads the project.
So, many times you don't do it as a way to kill time. You do it because none of what you have works.
If I had time and enough knowledge of any of the existing browsers codebases, I'd definitely try to create my own version. Here are things that are desperately needed and some even have been removed from browsers for no reason that I would like to have back.
1. Keyboard-driven interface.
2. Decent access to the browser's internal state for testing purposes.
When it comes to (1), there used to be a common pattern where pressing Alt would underscore letters in labels necessary to press in order to select that element. This is long gone now (and, frankly, wasn't that great, but it was something...) To clarify: it's not gone because the feature was removed, it's gone because a lot of controls simply don't have any labels, which breaks the system. Today, most browser elements have no way of activating them with the keyboard. Just a big middle finger from browser vendors.
When it comes to (2), the only thing we have is Selenium (and sometimes some extra stuff on top of that). But, Selenium has no access to anything that happens in the networking side of things (that's in the Web browser, which is all about networking... right?) So you cannot know if the page is loading anything, what it's loading, what's the status of things being loaded. It's ridiculous that people write tests with this handicap. With Selenium you also don't have access to code execution. So, you cannot see if the function was called, a variable was set etc. It's ridiculous how poor your access to the state of the program running in the browser is.
You used to be able to side-load some JavaScript into the browser and get access to browser's chrome, but that was removed because it was a "security concern" (but really, power-user features being removed is just a plan for cutting down functionality that affects the least users, has nothing to do with security).
Do I expect Firefox or any other browser to implement any of that any time soon or ever? -- Well, let's limit that to my lifetime, and the answer is a resounding "no". Hence forking.
I was under the impression (although I have never looked at the code), that Firefox UI is quite inflexible. It is fully functional for me every day and I am not missing anything (at least that I know of), but always thought, that it would probably be difficult to change the basics of FF UI. Maybe it is more flexible than I thought? Or they (Floorp) have put it great effort.
Firefox UI is very flexible, it's mainly just html+css+javascript at this point. But they have greatly removed support for changing through the UI itself over the years. So now you need to to change it through add-ons and hacks (userstyle/userchrome). Floorp seems to build mostly on those hacks and some internal addons of their own.
I truly love this browser, it's like Firefox+Edge/Opera but still remains fast:
- Most of Floorp's features are native, so unlike addons they won't slow down Floorp by much
- Vertical Tab being native makes it faster than anything else
- Sidebar is useful for multi-tasking
- Sleeping Tab saves system resource, and it's light for an tab unloader
- Workspace is like Panorama, very useful to create multiple work environments, and plus you can wrap them in containers to get the most out of Firefox's container feature
- Customizable hotkey is useful to rebind your hotkey, improve keyboard browsing experience, one of the rare browser that support hotkey rebinding.
Actually a great browser. Just installed it and I think I'll make the switch from Firefox, it has so many cool power user features!
Just wondering: Is there also a shortcut to toggle the right sidebar?
Been using it for well over a month now. I started after giving up trying to hack Firefox into giving me vertical tabs.
With Floorp I have vertical tabs that I can un/hide (using the mouse gesture feature).
The end result gives a much cleaner interface where I can focus on page content and not surrounding UI.
The built in mouse gesture plugin (which can be added to Firefox) takes me back to early Opera. I forgot how much I enjoyed using them.
What's the point of stating that "it's made in Japan"? I just don't get it. Does it have improved IME or CJK support? It's not like Japan is famous for its quality software to be honest.
People buying and flexing with stuff that have "Designed in California" engraved on them and being offended with an Open Source software that just want to say is it developed in Japan.
Stop over thinking and just appreciate people work.
And meanwhile, Japan has been the biggest video games actor in the industry for the latest 50 years, so I guess there are some engineers over there.
> People buying and flexing with stuff that have "Designed in California" engraved on them
Maybe I'm just in the wrong bubble, but I've never seen that.
> And meanwhile, Japan has been the biggest video games actor in the industry for the latest 50 years
Japanese games are often notorious bad on the technical details. Their focus is on the gaming part. Though, it has become a bit better in the last years, but usually because Japanese Companies have diversified into international teams.
> Japanese games are often notorious bad on the technical details.
You have to be from a parallel planet or a limited bubble to not notice that Japanese games have always generally had fewer bugs than Western games, and much less need for patches, ever since arcades and the NES.
Look at the PC ports. Games tied to FPS which results in poor in-game physics behavior. Inability to change settings. It's like they live on some other planet not us...
Devil May Cry 3 and Dark Souls 1 jumped to my mind immediately as notoriously bad ports. Even DMC4 and DMC5 have some problems. FromSoft games improved the quality of their ports on the other hand.
I do understand that Japanese mostly play on consoles but nowadays it's not an excuse anymore.
It's not even about common bugs, it's about design choices. PC players are accustomed to being able to tweak their games. But in Japanese games you either can't tweak anything or the tweaks just don't work because the developers hardcoded settings in the executable (DMC4 SE as an example).
>WHICH PC game has been free of bugs in recent times anyway?
Most indie games that I played. AAA-games are bug fests not because of the platform but because of the negligence by the developers.
>Fewer features
It's not like AAA games have an astonishing amount of features. Quantity over quality is currently driving AAA gaming market with its live service model.
Meanwhile an indie game must be feature rich to grab attention because there are thousands of games to choose from.
>most AAAs in the last couple years from Japan
Fewer games, fewer opportunities for messing up. On PC FromSoft games had problems with optimization (Elden Ring).
Seems like you're going to twist it around to "West is Best" chauvinism no matter what.
Elden Ring
Demon's Souls
Death Stranding
Resident Evil 4
Final Fantasy 7
Street Fighter 6
Final Fantasy 16
Armored Core 6...
Every major PS5 game in the last couple years, was virtually flawless on release day.
And of course Nintendo is still scoring hits with almost everything.
Meanwhile on Reddit everyone is crying about the PC versions, of even PC-only games!
Starfield has been a bug ridden joke, typical of Bethesda, one of the flagship Western studios, still unable to improve their janky physics and cringey NPCs.
Diablo 4 gave me the only crashes I have ever seen on the PS5.
Harry Potter, Redfall, Immortals of Aveum... overhyped flops. Baldur's Gate 3 has been the only saving grace from the Western gaming industry that I can think of.
Tears of the Kingdom is more featureful than the last few Assassin's Creed games and worked out of the box, which is more than I can say for today's Ubisoft products.
> Maybe I'm just in the wrong bubble, but I've never seen that.
Maybe not everybody is flexing but at least people are not complaining about that, like for this web browser.
> Japanese games are often notorious bad on the technical details. Their focus is on the gaming part. Though, it has become a bit better in the last years, but usually because Japanese Companies have diversified into international teams.
So when it's technically bad, it's because the company doesn't have foreigners, when it's good it's because non-Japanese people are working there. Noted.
Counting Minecraft and Tetris as American games? I suppose Microsoft bought Minecraft and EA licensed Tetris, but that seems to speak more to the business sense of American publishers than quality of American software development.
Eleven out of the twenty best-selling games are Japanese, and 28 out of the top 50.
> The particular mobile version of EA published Tetris was made in Moscow?
No, but if someone e.g. dubs (and perhaps even recuts) a film for the local market, we would generally still consider it to be "from" the place it was originally made.
> Also none of those are Japan.
Sure, just trying to puncture the americocentrism a little.
Is there seriously anyone outside of Apple marketing that pays attention to “designed in California”? Much less anyone that “flexes” this attribute?
And would it not be just as weird to say “designed in California” in the title of this webpage?
I don’t think anyone is questioning Japan having residents that can…fork Firefox. GP was questioning Japan as a mark of software quality, in an attempt to determine the intent behind the messaging.
It’a valid question. It’s a valid critique, even. There really is no need to get so defensive.
Maybe for someone who prefers to buy made in Japan over made in China. A made in Europe sticker would definitely appeal to me more than a made in China. At least on products that are not mass produced from established brands.
I couldn't care less where my item is produced. It just so happens that a large variety of high-end products are produced at a higher level of quality (and cost, generally) in the West (including S Korea and Japan); but if someone introduced me to a Nigerian, Mexican, Thai, etc product that surpassed my current choice, I would switch in an instant.
I don't understand caring at all about the source, unless there is some fundamental moral hangup with it (such as blood diamonds, for instance).
Privacy laws are different depending on the country of the publisher of the software.
Generally European countries provide the best protections and the fact it is published in Japan may imply that the US laws don’t apply there (and be a + or not)
Some people care about items not travelling twice the globe before landing home.
Other people care about work conditions for the produced items they buy, namely not manufactured by children, for which country origin could be an indicator.
I definitely have a preference for made in America, but that really only applies to physical products since there are strong associations with reputation and quality; the "country of origin" of software is far less well-defined in general, especially in the case of OSS.
It's sort of strange to me how many Americans seem to share the same sentiment when my experience has often been the total opposite.
China has some of the best factories, supply chains, and collaboration in the world. And while yes, of course, loads of intentionally cheap, low-quality goods are churned out regularly, many Chinese companies also make really solid products, often even the best products until you reach a certain ultra-luxury price bracket that they simply aren't trying to compete in.
For example, sure, an LG/Samsung/Sony OLED will be way nicer in terms of picture quality than any Hisense on the market. But the cheapest OLED on BestBuy right now is a last-gen, clearance 46" LG that costs almost ~$700; if you want a 50"+ model, be prepared to spend $1,000 minimum. On the other hand, the 75" U6H I got for $600 was better than any comparable non-OLED offering by non-Chinese companies until you got into the $1,000-1,200+ price range.
Midea is another good example; sure, Bosch, Miele, and Zojirushi often have much nicer luxury products, but if you're a middle/working-class person who doesn't want to or can't spend $300+ on a rice cooker, it'll be hard to beat--unless you get lucky like me and find the one weird guy in your town who happened to be moving cities and selling off all his appliances, including some perfect-condition JDM Zojirushi with an inverter for $100 (and also happen to have a Japanese friend you can annoy to help you figure out what all the Kanji menus do).
Same can be said for handset manufacturers like Xiaomi, etc. And a lot of audio gear as well; $100-200 Russian Oktava microphones easily punch several hundred to several thousand dollars above their class, Chinese brands dominate the mid-range IEM market, and Chinese headphone brands like HiFiMan are difficult to beat in any price bracket -- first paycheck I got, I spent $1,600 on Sennheiser HD 800 S because I wanted the HD 800 as a kid, but realistically, $300 HiFiMan Sundaras will get you almost there for over a thousand less.
Personally, every "made in America" thing I've bought that wasn't manufactured before like 1990 either fell apart and/or was ridiculously expensive compared to things made elsewhere. My association of made in America is either:
A. Truly craftsman, low-volume, specialized products that have an inherently high price tag
B. More commonly, low-quality, over-priced junk that survives only because of nationalism or protectionism alone
Not to bash on manufactured goods from china, but in a lot of product segments there really are a large difference in quality even from the upper end of middle priced products. I think this in large amount is origin agnostic though, and some of the reason china has gotten a bad reputation is that they are in a greater way willing to sacrifice quality to hit a lower price, and a lot of brands not paying the manufacturer above the bare minimum. I have had good and bad product origin from both China, and of European/American origin.
Annecdata, but a Chinese guy in my language class said that China was is trying to compete against quality rather than price, so maybe both are true at different points.
Yeah, Palestinian-American; I was born in Israel with Israeli and American citizenship, but grew up mostly in Florida, did a government thing in high school that sent me to Moscow, stayed in Russia for university, and back in the U.S. now.
> It's sort of strange to me how many Americans seem to share the same sentiment when my experience has often been the total opposite.
> China has some of the best factories, supply chains, and collaboration in the world. And while yes, of course, loads of intentionally cheap, low-quality goods are churned out regularly, many Chinese companies also make really solid products, often even the best products until you reach a certain ultra-luxury price bracket that they simply aren't trying to compete in.
Rather like conservatives' reflexive dislike for California despite more registered Republicans living in California than any other state.
It was very true before, but more like 10
years ago.
For example, Apple, one main reason they chose to produce a lot of the phone in China was because of infrastructure and skills that people have, and not costs anymore.
China (in particular when you see markets like Yiwu!) has an impressive ability to produce all type of quality and grade of products.
This is laughable. There are so many manufacturing skillsets that the US couldn’t dream to beat China in.
I am from neither country, from the perspective of residence, origin, or that of my family. I have absolutely no horse in the race. I just can’t believe that in 2023 Americans still believe this. Does anyone else remember Mac Pros being built in the US 10 years ago?
> It's not like Japan is famous for its quality software to be honest.
Exactly. The developers are probably proud to have built something (presumably) high-quality in Japan and they want to promote that fact to help shift the country's image I guess.
- Dense interfaces, flashy colors, the opposite of Apple-style minimalism
- Proprietary software
- Lots of customization when its comes to appearance / theming
- Passionate communities
- Traditionalism, resistance to change
- Function over security
It does not all apply to Floorp, but that's what I think when I think of "made in Japan" software.
For example, Floorp is open source, which I think is less common in Japan than in the west, and hopefully, it is secure. But the customization and "dual sidebar" (i.e. more stuff on screen) features are typically Japanese.
“In Rust” is a technical detail that influences various properties of the result (performance certainly; maintainability likely; immaturity possibly for areas like GUI). That’s quite different from “from Japan” which doesn’t say anything specific and measurable.
> What's the point of stating that "it's made in Japan"? I just don't get it.
What I don't get is why this is your main and only takeaway. It's such an odd and surprising reaction.
When I hear, for example, that Linux is being used at a gov site in Brazil or Germany or France - I get quit excited. I like that the FOSS is making inroads in other areas.
With the dominance of Chrome worldwide, I am equally excited that a group of developers from another country are helping push competition in this space, driving home the message of privacy. Mozilla needs it... we all need it for the health of the internet.
These guys have been at this for a while (based on their github page) and have made installers available for the main three OSes. I'm excited to give this a try.
I doubt that the accusations were about forcing Uyghurs labor in California to do the dirty design and R&D work. It was always about manufacturing and assembly, which definitely does not happen in California.
Japanese people are proud of their country. In some nations, like France or Bulgaria it’s taboo. But in the US or Japan it’s fine to be proud of where a product is coming from.
I get the opposite impression. Most people don't care. The remaining few, typically bigots, are active online. But you see those kinds of people almost anywhere on the globe.
There are, however, perceptions among the Japanese people that their own products are generally off higher quality.
Most Bulgarians are actually proud of their country, often sharing that the Cyrillic originated there, and focusing proudly on the old history and all kinds of inventors/achievements, even on stuff like the uniqueness of our yoghurt: so I have the opposite impression, as a Bulgarian
believe me the French are very, very proud of their country, that doesn't really mean you need to buy into rather cringy economic 'patriotism'. Especially when it makes zero sense as in the case of software. It's not like this browser came out of a 500 year old artisanal Japanese crafting shop, where the browser recipes where handed down the family tree
With these kinds of things it's basically, I have no way to differentiate my product, so I'm gonna slap the country flag on it for good measure
You were probably fortunate to live in the better part of France :)
In many parts of France, simply displaying the French flag in front of your house is very dangerous, whereas it is perfectly normal for everywhere else.
Most successful French startups move their HQ to US as soon as they can and claim they're a US company.
"Made in France" software is a shame and if you're targetting the global market (not just the French domestic market) no founder wants to advertise that.
Which is a shame because we have a lot of talented engineers in France, it's just that the biggest French software companies are frauds.
> Most successful French startups move their HQ to US as soon as they can
I'm pretty sure it is more a question of astonishing level of taxation and the difficulty to rise capital than national pride.
> "Made in France" software is a shame
Any source to back this? I've never read or heard anywhere that a piece of software sucks because it was made in France. I'm pretty sure most people don't care, and those who do (Frenchmen) take it positively.
This is purely personal opinion and I can only cite a couple of examples off the cuff, but I have noticed some Japanese authors can have an affinity for avoiding bloat. Whether this is intentional I do not know, but they seem comfortable writing relatively small, concise software.
(Now, this being HN I'm sure someone will cite some counter examples.)
I just copy-pasted the description from their site copy since the default title was too short :) They do mention Japan on their frontpage for some reason and I'm cool with that.
If you receive any email from US agencies and you are a Japanese company you can just say “no thank you I’m not interested” and it will most likely stop there.
If you are US company you don’t have a choice as it is the law.
Mozilla, Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, Signal, all have to respect the local laws.
just the pride? the same as some swiss businesses put 'made in Switzerland', or 'made in Germany', or how even some US politicians use Tesla, made in US as a point of pride?
It means many things, including "not made in PRC" (as much of a thing in world of software as world of appliances and electronics, similar implications)
Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org ) is the only real "hard" fork of Firefox. The others are all "soft" forks of Mozilla Firefox in that they all just customise some existing settings as defaults or customise the UI or integrate their own extensions of Firefox and rebrand it.
The PaleMoon team however forked even Mozilla Gecko ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) ), the browser engine that is at the heart of Firefox to create the Goanna browser engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) ) that now powers the PaleMoon browser and the Unified XUL Platform (a framework that can be used to create multi-platform desktop applications with web technologies).
Another "hard" fork of Firefox Gecko is the Servo browsing engine ( https://servo.org/ ) though no browser application has been built on it yet.
It's really unfortunate that the Pale Moon team are also totally unlikable, which is probably among the reasons why usage has dropped off since it was in vogue in the early-mid 2010s. This[0] issue in a WIP repo for OpenBSD always reminds me of the line in The Big Lebowski "You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole". It's fascinatingly hostile for little cause and a non-trivial amount of reputational damage. All in the name the vitally important cause of er... making sure there's not an implementation of Pale Moon that doesn't fully fit their license in a WIP repo.
I suspect that they don't attract the best contributors, given how hard they seem to be to work with.
> It's really unfortunate that the Pale Moon team are also totally unlikable, which is probably among the reasons why usage has dropped off since it was in vogue in the early-mid 2010s.
I'm not sure that's the reason. Regardless of feelings users may have toward developers, they'll still use the best tool for the job. I used Pale Moon on an older computer because none of the modern browsers performed well, including FF. I was well aware of some of the drama.
(Likewise, I raged against Microsoft for years before I made the switch to Linux. So many other examples)
I'm thinking that over the last 4 years (since 2019), many users have upgraded their hardware and the need for Pale Moon - as a lighter browser alternative - has simply diminished.
That is just completely opposed to the spirit of FOSS. A really sad way to treat contributors like Feodor, but a very effective way of ensuring I'll never use that fork
True enough. It was sort of a LoTR Wormtongue and King Theoden situation. While Tobin was around Moonchild made some terrible choices. It's much better now.
That is good to hear, but still, as another responder pointed out, the primary maintainer didn't handle things much better - although if he had, funnily enough, at least one of the incidents would've been resolved with a lot less reputational damage
Also, I find it slightly amusing how often they bring up the legal aspect of these licenses. They're not wrong, of course, but are they really going to hire lawyers to go after someone like Feodor? At most maybe they'll get it removed from Github and other platforms that care to respond to such requests?
And inherently a far less ram using browser. I do 500 tabs in under 3GB. By also not implementing all the useless attack surfaces like DRM, Integrated PDF reader, WebRTC, and friends it avoids many of the exploits which make modern browsers like FF and Chrome insecure. Overall it probably balances out. Especially since PM users are likely to have JS execution disabled by default (like I do).
Well, it's not Facebook, Twitter, Discord or the like. I'll to you that. It's mostly actual websites written in HTML (like HN). But even with no websites loaded if you tried to open 500 blank Chrome tabs you'd run out of RAM. That's just the nature of per-tab many process browsers.
And 500 is just my actively loaded tabs. I have another 500 suspended.
Another hard fork is Basilisk (https://www.basilisk-browser.org/), which was originally developed by the folks behind Pale Moon but is now independent.
Thanks for this list. I uncovered a couple of Desktop FF Forks I didn't know existed : Pulse Browser and Mercury (not including Floorp, this submission). A couple of months ago it was Mullvad.
I'm really happy to see developers taking an active interest in modifying/forking FF. I was beginning to believe that interest in FF was dying out and so I'm finding this submission, as well as this list - extremely exciting!
