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phantomathkg
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?
onthecanposting
I wouldn't be that shocked if four students with no budget produced a better product than the Mozilla Corporation.
NBPEL
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 ?
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papaver-somnamb
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.
rjh29
It's just a country like any other, most of us are proud of the things our country has done.
cassepipe
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.
taeric
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.
afavour
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.
lost_tourist
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.
rjh29
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.
lmm
Unicode is standardised in a way that uniquely screws the Japanese language. So using "international" applications tends to be uniquely bad in Japan.
rjh29
Could you elaborate?
wink
German here. If it's digital, be extra critical, especially if the government is involved ;)
Tijdreiziger
And yet, cheap Chinese manufacturing has taken over the world. When it comes to money, pride isn't so important to most of us.
simonebrunozzi
My guess is that you never visited Japan, or spent significant time with Japanese people. Am I correct?
lloeki
> Japanese localization
Shift-JIS or whatever 0x5c shenanigans were immediately brought back to mind.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061208222907/http://blogs.msdn...
Still makes ripples to this day:
https://superuser.com/questions/1167662/why-is-windows-10-di...
pezezin
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?
ranger_danger
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).
brabel
> 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 :).
dilawar
> 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.
sfink
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.)
finite_depth
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.
em-bee
it is particular in just how strong this sense in japan is.
the isolation policy in the past didn't come from nothing.
everywhere else it generally also differs by industry more than in japan.
have_faith
The UK these days is a bit of a mixed bag. The love/loathe difference depends a lot on the product category.
fiddlerwoaroof
I was just thinking about the IT Crowd joke where the fire extinguisher’s flammability is explained because it was “Made in Britain”.
Razengan
Even in other countries "Made In Japan" still automatically implies quality.
amadeuspagel
But is it written in Rust?
replete
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.
Hendrikto
> 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.
replete
"It's a rhetorical question though - effective organization appears hard to scale especially when there is no money involved."
I agree with you, growing beyond a single small team is another game entirely
crabbone
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.
replete
Although this wasn't my point – that forks are pointless –, I agree.
angra_mainyu
Have a look at NYXT
ranger_danger
> Why are all these people building different sandcastles when they could be working together?
Why are chefs baking bread? There's buildings to construct.
iguana_lawyer
I have been using it for months and it’s great. It’s like Vivaldi but with Firefox under the hood instead of Chrome.
zelphirkalt
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.
PurpleRamen
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.
NBPEL
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.
Kuraj
It would be great to include more screenshots showcasing the features before I decide to download and install this.
strobe
very nice that it has option to move tabs to bottom and hide address bar automatically - what other forks has support for that?
(bottom tabs - seems previously it was possible to do that for vanilla Firefox via userChrome.css but that becoming harder to do which each release)
acd
Happy to see tracking protection in Floorp.
Why you need tracking protection. Try javascript fingerprinting:
whalesalad
Phonetically - as a Japanese speaking person - how would this be pronounced?
matternous
This website[1] indicates it is pronounced like “flope” (フロープ).
tmtvl
Probably something like "furoaapu".
goodpoint
...badly.
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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.