I genuinely thought this was satire, never heard of either and have only just started with LibreWolf… now I have more options to research!
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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same here; this comm is always good at making me aware of what i don't know (which is a lot. lol)
Here I am thinking what's a floorp and mixing it up with the plumbus.
When I read "floorp" my mind immediately went to a mopping robot vacuum 🤣
I use Floorp, haven't tried Zen though. I remember some drama of Floorp temporarily closing it's source but I believe it's open source now. I like it for the side bar it comes with, it's pretty useful for multitasking but I guess you could just open two windows and place them side by side
It's indeed open source. No issues today.
Zen left dev mode on in prod so everyone using it was exposed and the dev played it down iirc
A dev made a mistake when the product was still in alpha and fixed it immediately after becoming aware of it. Let’s never use the product ever again!
I guess I didnt remember it correctly, and I do still use it after they fixed it. What's with the tone?
Not OP, Remember, it's hard to read true tone through text. It read to me is sarcasm, but not particularly spicy, and also not entirely inaccurate.
I do wish we could all have less tone issues. This place is getting a bit toxic, but fuck, it's still better than Reddit.
;)
Both are using Firefox base
I like to test browsers through www.browseraudit.com although im not sure how reliable the results are. I tend to stick with Browsers that score high 390's / 400.
In case you are wondering, Floorp scored a 400, while Zen scored a 397. Not bad at all
Weird that both taskbar icons for both browsers are the same? (Yellow circle with white "W" on it). Both were downloaded for linux, zipped.
(Yellow circle with white “W” on it)
thats the wayland icon, for whatever running it didnt map the icon
Thanks for the resource. I use Brave and it got a 397 as well. I’ll have to check out Zen and Floorp as well.
I tried zen and then someone told me something concerning I forgot about by now so I switched back. Floorp I've never even heard of, but I'd have a hard time taking anything called that seriously.
That only seems relevant if one uses the defaults, and if you care about privacy you probably don't, so idk what's the goal of this little experiment other than just curiosity.
It'd be a whole lot more useful if it was "here's the connections these browsers made after enabling all privacy-preserving settings they offer".
A lot of users care about privacy but find it unattainable due to technical difficulties.
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Privacy needs to be the default in order to be recommended, in my opinion.
Floorp is just cool
I've switched from Librewolf to Zen for a few months now, and it's been great so far. There is all the fun features like the essentials tab, and the tab groups. Also Zen Mods is super cool. It is like a repo of css mods for zen.
There was some controversy about the debug thing, but as others pointed out, it happened during the alpha phase, when the development team is still new to the project.
For hardening, you can use Arkenfox, Betterfox, or Phoenix. All of these work on Zen (I've tried them all). Librewolf is based on Arkenfox, so if you use it, you'll get most of Librewolf's privacy features. I recommend Arkenfox. Personally, I believe Betterfox is a balance take between privacy and usability, while Phoenix is the most extreme option. Arkenfox offers stronger privacy features than Betterfox but is not as extreme as Phoenix.
Edits: also don't forget uBlock :)
You trying to coax me from librewolfs maturity for new browsers?
To consider: sticking with the main browsers helps you resist fingerprinting
I think that it's your browser, your choice.
I use Firefox, and don't worry about a thing. :-) Not even what you like for a browser.
I generally tend to stay with browsers I know. It's tedious enough hardening Firefox and getting everything down to a note. I do have Librefox onboard but I rarely use it.
What do you to harden Firefox?
I've used a few tutorials online, and was looking through my bookmarks. This one is pretty good:
https://brainfucksec.github.io/firefox-hardening-guide
I also run Enhanced Tracking Protection in the 'Privacy and Security' settings in firefox at Custom with all options ticked except:
- Allow Firefox to automatically apply exceptions required to avoid major website breakage.
- Also apply exceptions automatically that are only required to fix minor issues and make convenience features available.
Whatever breaks, breaks.
Additionally, 'DNS over HTTPS' set at Max Protection.
Again, whatever breaks breaks and I move on to another site.
Half my stuff breaks with the protection I use. The privacy/security struggle is real.
The privacy/security struggle is real.
Solidarity my brother. If I can't bend a website to my will, screw it. The info is more than likely duplicated across the internet anyways.
Consider if a theme could accomplish what you want: It seems like they all use firefox under the hood, and if all you want is appearance, you shouldn't need to change your entire browser. Keeping in mind that a smaller fingerprinting pool is less anonymous, if you care about that.
I haven't actually used any other than librewolf though, so if switching provides any features you care about, go for it.
Zen video playback was awful for me, but I like almost everything else about it.
I use Vivaldi and Zen as second. I need the sync function and I don't want an Mozilla account, nor an third party solution. Vivaldo offers full sync ee2e no knowledge in the own server in Iceland.
Vivaldi isn’t open source. Not sure I’d trust that from a privacy perspective.
You can, part of the script corresponding to its UI is proprietary, but UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS and even moddeable by the user, but can't be forked legally by Chrome or EDGE (🖕) nor by other browsers. It`s something like open proprietary freeware. There are no logs, tracking or any other crap. nor third party investors. Sync ee2e no-knowledge. The rest is OpenSource with several different licenses, specificated in the source package. As all other browser, collecting anonym statistical data (country for lenguage settings, OS, needed tecnical data)
I believe the term you’re looking for might be “source-available”
Yes, something like this, despite not fully OpenSource, it's pretty trustworth because of this, there is nothing shady or hidden in Vivaldi.
If you can’t compile it yourself, it doesn’t count.
You are free to compile it for yourself if you are masochist enough to compile a browser from source, only you can't do it legally distributing it under an other brand than Vivaldi. That is the only limit.
I promise it won’t work with the files they provide.
I use Zen for YouTube, and so does my producer. We don't use Floorp as of right now.
Dude gleebal browser is so much better man wtf ):<
I have used Zen a lot since the early days and it has been very good. Suits my needs perfectly. However, recently I started testing out Orion and it has also been very nice. It has very good privacy and is WebKit if you’re into that. I’m just happy with anything not Blink.
Isn't Blink the Google component?
Correct. I prefer to avoid the browsers that use their browser engine.
No, Blink is the render engine of Chromium, same as Gecko in Firefox. Blink is one of the forks of KHTML, made by KDE, same as WebKit. It is used by Google use it in the Chrome browser and also EDGE, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and other, forks of Blink are Qt browsers, eg. Otter browser or Falcon. Goanna is an fork from Gecko, used by eg. Pale Moon, Basilisk and K-Melon. But these forks only making sense for older devices and OS with few sys specs, due to limited functionality and compatibilities with certain web contents. Qt engines because of this more used in auxiliar app, eg. mail clients.
There are only this three engines + the 2 forks, which can be used by the current browsers, apart of some basic engines used by text only browsers, like eg Lynx or Links
Floorp
Wow zen has really matured since I first tested it out. I have a really nice adwaita setup on base firefox but it's tempting me to switch over.
Any opinions on Firedragon (Floorp's fork, default in Garuda linux)
It’s looks alright only problem might be it’s a very small project so updates might be off idk they mostly took librewolf privacy /security and floorp customization and smashed it into one web browser
I come from Vivaldi, and Zen was the only customizable powerhouse that equaled the former. Next to Zen I also use LibreWolf, and Waterfox on Android.
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
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