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The FireDragon browser

Initial idea 🐺 #

Recently we got to know that Mozilla no longer supports free internet. Their browser, Firefox, collects a lot of telemetry by default. Since using Chromium-based browsers is not an alternative (There shouldn’t be a single browser engine dictating web standards! 👀), some people decided to step in and provide a better solution. Librewolf is a community-maintained project which removes the privacy-compromising parts and provides an additionally hardened browser config. That means no about:config tweaking is needed to get going - everything just works after opening the browser for the first time. It has a few drawbacks though: It does not integrate well into Garuda dr460nized and has too strict default settings for most people.

Creating an alternative 🐉 #

When I found out that a talented Maintainer brought a PKGBUILD to AUR which can build Librewolf from Firefox’s nightly branch I was interested in using it! Even better, with some modifications, I was able to build a custom-branded version with my settings called FireDragon. The initial idea was to create a fork of librewolf-hg however this quickly changed when the Garuda forum got interested in a stable version as well. This fork ships saner defaults to also include regular (not paranoid 😋) users of Garuda Linux in its audience and ships with the searX search engine by default, some handpicked patches from Gentoo, Ubuntu & Debian and some useful add-ons. Of course, FireDragon is available at Chaotic-AUR - the nightly firedragon-hg package is even built daily from the latest source!

Notable features 🔥 #

There are some features that I love about this browser:

  • App menu support thanks to Ubuntu patches
  • Enhanced KDE integration thanks to OpenSUSE patches
  • Better system library usage thanks to Gentoo patches
  • Uses the self-hosted sync server of Garuda to sync the Mozilla account
  • Uses the self-hosted Whoogle instance of Garuda as the default search engine

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