 So for the longest time I was on a web browser journey of sorts if you watched my channel for a fairly long time You'll know that I was switching back and forth between browsers almost as often as I was switching back and forth between Linux distributions I was a browser hopper if you will. I tried Firefox and went back and forth between various chromium Things and I tried Vivaldi and Edge for a little while because apparently there was a point there where I just completely lost my sanity But I've tried almost all the browsers I've wanted to use you know cute browser for a while in the past but had problems because it didn't have good ad blocking and you know I've tried all of them and Eventually that got kind of old and I settled down on Firefox for the longest time and then I moved on to Vivaldi now I have a an entire video on why I use Vivaldi as my main browser and yes I know it's proprietary and it's garbage and all that stuff I understand if that's your point of view and that's a perfectly fine Fine point of view to have but I like Vivaldi for the reasons I stayed in that video But Firefox is always there in the background You know causing me a little bit of guilt because it is open source and I feel like I should be you know Supporting open source projects when I can but of course there are features in Vivaldi They're just really aren't in Firefox or at least aren't easily replicated in Firefox So I've been kind of stuck on Vivaldi although I don't call it stuck because I do enjoy it But whatever that's beside the point one of the things that I was surprised about though Is when someone on discord pinged me about a brand-new browser that I've never heard of before That emulates a lot of the stuff that the Vivaldi does but is based on Firefox instead of Chromium And the browser that I'm talking more that I was told about is called Florp. Now Let's just get this out of the way. Florp. F-L-O-O-R-P Is the worst name for a browser that I've ever heard of so if you're the developer of Florp I'm sorry, bro, but your name is crap. It's really bad. It's I'm sorry. You need to find a new name But the browser itself is actually really really good now. Is it gonna get me to change away from Vivaldi? I don't think so. It is still missing if you know the main feature and the main reason why I use Vivaldi, but It's pretty close. It's pretty pretty close if they were to add tab groups and workspaces to Florp, you'd have me switching today. That's how good it is. So let's talk about Florp I'm gonna scowl every time I say the name Promise you but before we do if you leave a thumbs up on this video. I'd really appreciate it It really helped the channel. So let's go ahead and take a look at Florp So this here is Florp and if you're saying well that kind of looks like Firefox Well, it is Firefox just with a lot of extra stuff on top of it now when a Company or a developer or whatever forks Firefox then adds things to it Traditionally the way they do so is with extensions. So basically they just give you Firefox with some extensions That's the way that's mostly the way like mall that browser does it It's mostly the way things like Libre will do it, you know They obviously they do add some stuff to Firefox But a lot of the stuff that's there that they tout as features come to you in the way of Extensions Florp doesn't actually do it that way as you can see there are no actual extensions installed in Florp now It's a little bit deceiving because it does appear that they actually integrate some extensions into the browser They just do so without actually installing the extensions themselves. They integrate them fully into the experience, which is One way to do it. I'm not sure if I'm happy that they're there You know, like I can't actually, you know, pull them out if I would want them But I can also see the benefits of doing it that way But I also see a lot of downsides like if the extension gets updated But the developers of Florp don't update it, you know They can there can be some messiness there in the future And there are a few examples of them actually doing this and we'll talk about those as we go along But that seems to be the way they handle extensions right up front And that's how they've added features is from some extensions and also some things that they've done on their own So let's talk about some of those features. What actually makes Florp special besides the crazy and wacky name? Well, there are several things really so first the design of it So if we go to the settings the first thing I did not record the initial setup But you can get to all the initial setup stuff here right in the settings They have different versions of the Firefox UI so you can change to the proton UI, which looks something like this This is the photon UI. They have the flurry all UI, which is that this is depreciated They have the GNOME theme which is depreciated which looks like that and you can just switch for these through these You know hot swappable. They like to switch right away a lot of times when They use different actual design themes that looks like they're using CSS to do these things You have to relaunch the browser in order to get to that direction You don't have to do that here, which is nice You can also change the bar the tab bar style so you can change it. It's horizontal by default So it looks like this you can change to the multi-route tab bar which looks like this or my favorite You can change to a vertical tab bar just like that And it looks like this and it works really well now You can see like here's your first example of them using an extension built right into the web browser So they have they're doing this here by using tree style tab Which is a very popular extension to get vertical tabs. They've built it right into floor One of the things that's even more interesting about this is that they do ask you to actually install the extension so that you get more options So you can then have the tree style tab options You just go to the add-on section of Mozilla you can install that and then it will give you the options to actually customize the parts of Floor that came from the extension now you as far as I can tell you can't take those parts out But you could then uninstall the extensions so earlier when I said you couldn't install it if you install the extra part You can obviously disable that later on now There are other settings that they've built in depending on which tab bar you're using so you can Have it optimized for a vertical bar if you're using a vertical bar if you're not using it It has other options for things like hiding the tabs on a horizontal bar So if you don't want the tabs to appear at all you can display the top tab bar underneath the toolbar You can display the tab bar at the bottom of the window So if you wanted to if we wanted to go to back up here to the horizontal top bar We could change it so that the tab bar is at the bottom Which is something that you can't do in Firefox without using user Chrome So the reason why I say that this is very close to what the Voli does is a Voli does kind of the exact same thing Is it allows you to change where? The tab bar is where the the address bar is where the sidebar is all that stuff can be changed Hot swappable right inside of the Voli settings and here with Thorpe You can do that on a Firefox based browser as well, which is really really sweet But it's not just the UI that they've changed So there are several other things as well So if I have two tabs here I can actually select both of them and then right click hit fixed and split view and Showing left and right and actually I can actually tile tabs just like I can in Vivaldi now regular Firefox if we switch to regular Firefox I can select the same two tabs right click and there's no option for that those aren't options that you have and So that's something else that they've built in this is back to floor up and this is really cool You can also you the one thing you can't do it's not quite as flexible with all the is that you can't change the size So in Vivaldi you can hover here in the middle and actually drag one to the side So one smaller than the other maybe that's something that they can add late in a later version But the fact that this feature is here is really really cool So you can get out of the the tile or fixed split view just by going here and Hitting close split tab and it goes back to normal if we do another right click here You can also see some of the other things that they've enabled and added to their context menu So they have this option here keep tab awake. So if you want Your tab to stay awake and not hibernate. You can select this also by default Firefox if we go back to Firefox here, we can we can see that containers aren't actually enabled by default you have to have a Extension in order to do that now Firefox containers are one of the most wonderful features Firefox actually has and They are kind of built in you just have to enable them in order to do so So the fact that Thorpe has them enable out of the box So you can right-click and move to a container tab so that they can be categorized Or you can open up a new tab in a container. So if you go here just do You know personal or whatever and it opens up a container in personal and it works really really well Containers are a fantastic feature that Firefox has and Thorpe has them enabled out of the box That's really really cool. Now in terms of tabs one of the things that it's missing and this is a big big downside for me is Tab groups tab groups aren't here I really wish that they were because that would make it just one step closer to being able to take over Vivaldi for me But it's just not here and like said they could Find themselves like simple tab groups and integrate that in if they could possibly do that That'd be like that push it over the top for me I could even see myself getting rid of workspaces on Vivaldi Just being happy without them if I could have tab groups in simple tab groups here built in now Obviously, I could just install that extension if I wanted to that could bring us close But I'd like to have it built in just because the rest of the stuff is built in right so that part that feature there is still missing Now there are a few other Features that I'm not gonna cover here in depth. There is a sidebar so you can do simple things like a Web panel like you can do in fire in Vivaldi So you can actually see that it has web panels as well So this is that Google Translate or whatever and you could add mass to down like I have in Vivaldi or ESPN Like I've done in Vivaldi and add them just here in the tech in the sidebar You'll have also have access to your downloads your history and your your bookmarks right here in the in the sidebar Now another thing that is missing here when it comes to this is the ability to collapse this or move or move it around I'm not sure if you can move it around Let me see you can move it to the right or left if you want to but it doesn't look like you can actually Hide it away like collapse it beyond what this is, but you can Change the width of it, which is actually kind of cool It's not something that you can usually do and these kind of things You can just make it actually smaller if you want and you can also change where it gets the little favicons as well If you wanted to do that so that's really interesting as well I wish you could collapse it so if you didn't want to use that you don't have to You can actually change it so not to not show it at all, but on Vivaldi on Vivaldi There's actually I don't know if you guys will be able to see this But there's a little arrow over here if I wanted to hide it completely I can get that and then I can bring it back and then you know This is what a side panel actually looks like In Vivaldi and it kind of works exactly the same way that you can see where they've gotten inspiration It's just not quite as fully featured now They've also added many different settings into the settings application as well I'm not gonna go through all of them because they just take too long But they've added a download manager so that you can see the download managers over here You can change how that operates and how it looks you can change Do a lot of the same things you can do inside of Firefox Obviously most of the Firefox stuff is still here as well You can customize most of your keyboard shortcuts as well You can change what the home stuff is most of the stuff here is directly from Firefox But they've added a few things here or there and in terms of sync basically what they've done is They've integrated Mozilla sync so they just use the regular Firefox syncing capability But they do have something called forp view now as far as I can tell forp view is just a Syncing mechanism for getting your tabs from forp to Firefox So they've integrated with the Miss your Mozilla account to get your tabs from your one device to another So you can do that. I haven't tested this out So I don't know how well it works or what's actually different about it in terms of just using Mike or Mozilla sync So I'm not sure what's going on there But this is something that they've built in and it's another feature that they have So there's that now a couple things that I've just noticed as I've been using this for the last hour or so is That they have the extensions menu here in two different places. So I don't really care for that It's kind of redundant. You could obviously get rid of this. I believe And I'm not gonna let you get rid of that but I wonder if you can get rid of this one Probably in the settings if we go to the settings back here to the browser menu and go to The extensions part isn't here actually Okay, so you can't actually get rid of the second one either. That's disappointing But it's in both places. It doesn't actually hurt anything But the fact that they're both there basically at this in the same spot is kind of annoying In terms of actual browser spree now get it remember that browser speed tests are highly dependent on the hardware So floor in this particular browser test on my particular hardware receive a 206 test per minute run per minute speed score Firefox itself if we go to Firefox, I've run this also in Firefox on the same it got 186 So if you want to take that as scientific you can They're Apparently floorp is a little bit faster I'm not sure if you would run this test over and over again if that you know would hold up or if it Would change as you opened up more tabs in one or the other. I don't know about any of that I've only run it the one time so take that as you will so this is floor And like I said, there are tons of features here that I haven't actually covered And I will link to their github and their website down below I don't know anything about the developers of this this particular project So just I'm gonna put that right out there for you guys to know all about you can do your own research on on Who the developers of this are it has been around for a little while So it's not like brands making new project But you just still keep an eye on you know when you're trying a fork of something by a certain developer That's not the main developer you should still understand that you're using it from someone you're probably not aware But it is free and open source so you can go through the source code if you are Interested in doing so you can see all of the commits and stuff like that if you want to just to make sure that nothing is being Pulled over your eyes, so it's all right here for you if you want to so that is floorp and Like I said at the beginning it is very very close to the Voli They've done a really really good job of integrating stuff that they found or coded themselves in various ways to Imitate what the Voli does. It's close It's not quite there not quite there There are some features like the collapsible Sidebar that I'd like to see but really the big one is Workspaces and tab groups that's still the big feature for me in the Voli and until that's in a Firefox clone I'll be sticking with the Voli now Integrating simple tab groups would get you 90% of the way there that's basically It's almost workspaces. It's not quite tab stacks, which is all the Voli has but they have the multi-line Tabs in floorp so they could theoretically get there if they wanted to it's very very close Right like it's very very close. So I'm very impressed with for such as it is I don't know how stable it is I didn't use it long enough to actually be able to talk about how stable it is or how often it's updated or any of that stuff So if you try this just keep you know keep your head on the swivel and make sure you know what's what's what and all that stuff So that is floorp if you have thoughts on this browser, you can leave those in the comment section below It's a very very early first look at this browser So I hope you enjoyed it if you did make sure you leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it really helps the channel you can also follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links have been Description you can support me at patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast and if you want to help support the channel You can head on over to the merch store, which is at shop that the links cast at org there You'll find T-shirts and hats and mugs and desk mats and all sorts of stuff all that stuff goes directly to help the channel So thanks everybody who has done that and we'll do that in the future I really do appreciate that shop that the links cast at orks Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube because they're all Absolutely amazing without you the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it I said just thank you so very very much for your support you guys are awesome. Thanks everybody for watching everybody everybody Everybody thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time