Cool. But…, could you name those explicitly?

Thanks for checking out! Not in the readme, because it would be a PITA to keep that up to date over time, especially when rewriting for new context each time. They are already covered in release notes and commit log¹ for the curious. You can also look under patches/kon in the source git repo.

This is a relevant example.

Could you please explain why anyone should consider Konform Browser over it?

Am engineer not a salesperson. I guess that means at this early stage it’s primarily targeting the audience who are able/willing to make sense of and contextualize the given material themselves, or willing to take a leap of faith. The pros/cons vs other browsers is something I hope to leave to users to talk about and share around. Would be cool to hear your thoughts, for example! Maybe this is relevant for some, though.

Also, pull requests attempting to improve the documentation are very much welcome. Would be great to get more contributors involved and one doesn’t have to be deeply technical to write good docs.

¹: Can click the commit hash for a release under /releases and then xxx commits to list commits for specific release

What an atrocious comment choice.

It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.

Agreed that would be nice. Closest you get conveniently from inside browser today is to switch temporarily to “Basic Features” preset for model downloads (then maybe restart for good measure) and switch back to “Core Security” preset for actual use.

re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/

I don’t think it will be directly bundled due to the list updates and some users will not want it so it should remain optional. That being said, will already be looking at packaging for NoScript so when that happens I think should be reasonable to do the same with up-to-date uBO.

are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?

Answered this here.

Officially can’t/won’t due to Github being both unreasonable and a supply-chain risk. Anyone is free to do so independently, however. If done in responsible and reasonable way (don’t introduce breaking patches or leave users hanging weeks without security updates plz) could be supportive of such initiative whether done indepently or via Konform Codeberg.

Oh, thanks for bringing that up - it’s out of date and no longer true so I guess the readme does need an update. While you are correct, the offline translations feature in Firefox (and LW) won’t actually work when blocking its access to RemoteSettings server. As Konform Browser does have a strict policy of not initiating connections to “trusted” servers on its own by default and without explicit user consent, it made more sense to remove it than leaving UI for a completely broken feature until it could be done properly.

Since that was written:

• That bug was fixed in Konform so translations do work fully offline now
• An about:welcome “onboarding” screen was introduced where user has 4 presets to choose from. 3 of them (all but Purely Private 🔒️) enable translations feature and 2 (✳️Basic Functionality and 🦊Just Make It Work) enable the automatic downloads of models from Mozilla server like in FF.

So in reality I would say offline local translations actually work better in Konform than in FF and other forks.

In the future hoping to improve this further by redistributing the models as packages for separate installation on system. Then you can use them without needing the browser itself to download anything at all. Similarly to how it’s already done for spelling dictionaries and uBlock Origin.

Care to comment on the actual content of post or the topic of the project rather than aesthetics of the thumbnail icon? This isn’t c/logodesign? 🙄

While that section in readme is not entirely up to date, it’s still valid and combining that with release notes should hopefully give decent idea. Let me know if you have remaining questions after returning from those! You could also try it out and see for yourself.

Some day, someone is going to have to explain this one…

There is actually a third visual reference in the logo that may be a bit less obvious.

LibreWolf, on the other hand, works by spoofing a different fingerprint every session.

Is that true? I think it’s not that much of a fundamental difference in strategy as you say. While LW (like MB) does randomization of e.g. WebGL and Canvas fingerprints, in general other fingerprintables are also kept static. From my perspective it’s more a difference in degrees than direction. Have you checked how your font fingerprint persist?

I believe both Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf come with uBlockOrigin pre-installed

Not exactly. LW comes without the addon but is configured to download and install uBlock Origin from addons.mozilla.org the very first thing it does. This is in contrast with Mullvad Browser (which does bundle the addon) and Konform Browser (which will load locally installed system uBO from known path if installed from distribution package manager).

If you’re looking for something to use with actual accounts (like banking), use hardened Firefox (with arkenfox) or a hardened chromium browser.

Konform Browser is intended to support that use-case and also worthy for consideration. Would be curious to hear if you agree or how you think it falls short!

I am an exclusive flatpak user (as much as possible at least)

In that case I will certainly encourage you to get more comfortable with the flatpackaging side and getting that local build env up for yourself! Having self-hosted repo for self-built packages¹ in whatever format you use is one of the most liberating things one can set up IMO. Looking forward to seeing you around on the issue tracker ;)

¹: Ideally with sensible lifecycle 🤭

Ah, sorry you’re having issue! Re video playback¹:

• Do you have a URL not working for you I can reproduce your issue with (you can DM me if not want to share public)?
• Media Codec installed and available? about:support and look Media -> Codec Support Information. Are you on Arch perchance?
• Tried the “Basic Functionality” preset? about:welcome should show on first launch, can also be reused later.
• It’s not likely but still possible that some preference set in your old LW profile interferes. Different result in fresh profile?
• Same result without addons? (“Troubleshoot Mode” under about:support)
• Left-hand side of address bar, there should be a shield and couple of icons. You can click those to temporarily or permanently unlock protections for current site.
• In a fresh profile, you could try “Just Make It Work” preset - does it work there? That will, among other things, enable DRM modules and allow the browser to silently download and execute binaries from Cisco and Google in background, just like vanilla FF. This behavior is disabled under the other presets for security reasons and I don’t recommend it much beyond testing and troubleshooting.
• Sometimes, sites blocking you will yield CORS errors in console. If that’s the case you should also see HTTP responses with 4XX status codes under Devtools Network tab. or 5XX if legit server error.

¹: Should work; I’m streaming 4k fine.

Not highly prioritized since:

1. We’d need someone with a Github account (ie not us) to step up as maintainer for that in order to be on flathub.
2. Arguably problematic security tradeoffs for browser (yes flatpak has its own sandboxing but that disables the one of browser)
3. Users run into frustrating and confusing edge-cases with not working devices, directories, addon integrations, etc, and not grokking the security model. Flatseal is a bit obscure still.
4. Container option exists for advanced users who want containerization

That said, there is a starting point - if anyone feels inclined to pick it up shows up on the forge, would be happy to collaborate towards that. You can also just go ahead and package it up independently from us if you wish (free software and all that).

Are you on some dist existing package repos aren’t covering? Or just a matter of preference?

Ah, glad it worked out! Somehow this earlier reply only came in here after posting the same suggestion ;^^

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and impressions!

Thanks for trying! Hmm, so I haven’t performed such a profile migration myself recently.

Previously, it was enough to just drop the directory over (which I guess is what you did?) but as Konform and LibreWolf are tracking different FF branches, this kind of things is not unexpected. “Touching tips” is a ~yearly happening and next time is currently many months away - such long time to wait!

Now, I am thinking of two options (in any case: separate backup first!):

• Profile Backup / Restore https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-backup under about:preferences
• Use a Sync Server (either Firefox Sync or self-hosted syncserver) and sign in with same account in both to sync over.

If you have a librewolf.overrides.cfg, that should still be possible to just copy into your ~/.konform dir or corresponding system path regardless of rest of profile.

While the application code itself is C++/JS, instrumentation code is Python. Sure could use a hand with getting instrumented testing up for existing suites. Automated testing for network leaks etc would also be neat.

(I guess manual testing is not in scope for what you are looking for here but that is of course also welcome)

Feel free to open an issue on tracker if you think it might be relevant and want to discuss ideas, or you can “DM” here!

https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/

EDIT to add: If not (aw), how about QubesOS?

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues?q=state%3Aopen+label%3A"C%3A tests"

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2916