Konform Browser and other bits and bobs.

  • 5 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 26 days ago
cake
Cake day: January 18th, 2026

help-circle





  • good point for the offlineimap cronjob, I’ll take note of that.

    I might as well go as far as suggesting to start there with your current mail provider if the local/offline-first flow is something that could work for you (and assuming it’s not something you already do, in which case carry on). Once you’ve adapted to a local-first mail reading flow with any client that’s separate from the “app” or webmail tethered to your mail service, then rest of migrations should be smoother and hopefully feel less daunting. Doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it that way only forever but establishing the infra and habit once for a while can help with both resilience and confidence in everything that follows.

    If you’re roaming between devices and places enough that local-first feels untenable then the “syncbox” could be a little SBC or whatever; it could be the machine you also use read and write mail from but doesn’t have to be.

    NP and good luck!


  • No experience with Migadu but yeah, I think 1 account = 1 login is the intended meaning in their FAQ.

    At $19/year couldn’t just gifting a separate micro sub to your SO might be a option if you adminning her email feels weird to either of you?

    Am I missing something else?

    You don’t mention how you’ll be accessing your emails so maybe this is something you already solved for: Regularly syncing down all mail locally means you won’t have to rely on the mail provider as a single-point-of-failure for keeping your emails safe, secure, private and available. This could consist of anything from a simple offlineimap cronjob to a full-blown “offline” separate mail server.





  • Assuming you mean the Mullvad extension (which is installed by default in MB) and not the Mullvad VPN app (which also exists but never came close to these machines) :)

    That will indeed likely make a difference on Mullvad Browser numbers. However for now I’m not changing the “keep addons at stock defaults” invariant or the test matrix might get really out of hand… Should we disable uBlock Origin in LibreWolf? How about uBO or NoSccript in Mullvad then? Konform Browser loads uBO but only if its apt package is installed; should we do that? What happens when we try to explicitly opt out of everything under Preferences in Firefox? I guess the last one is something to actually consider but for now not touching the addons.

    (Would be super cool if anyone else tries this out and reports back though! The compose should hopefully be straight forward and easy to get started with if you are on Linux and have podman available. The report mentions it TL;DR we had to work around the oBO install in LW not properly utilizing the proxy (?) like this and I think same approach could be used to Uninstall Mullvad extension from Mullvad Browser and prevent it from even loading)


  • Disclaimer: Am konform dev so shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s working well for ourselves I guess. Eager to hear to what extent it’s overfitted for our usage or really as great as I think it is ;)

    BTW if you, dear reader, think queries in report of results are cherry-picked in a way that favors it (I don’t think they are but hey, fair), I’m also eagerly accepting input and especially PRs for queries (still have the raw dumps so I can add this quickly) or steps to test procedure (this means I have to rerun all of them so might take longer to update) that could illustrate different tradeoffs and show a more complete picture. Bring it on <3


  • Daily-driving it now. I think it’s great. If you’re somewhat familiar with the landscape otherwise I think readme explains how it’s different and why. If you don’t mind losing out on some "safety"1 and latest upstream features2 for the sake of a more stable and predictable base, not having reliance on proprietary integrations or even internet, and really removing all non-essential network integrations, then definitely worth a try!

    1: A surprising amount of people think (or at least write online) that a browser that doesn’t block user requests completely aligned with the Google SafeBrowsing blocklists is unsafe and that doing those syncs is an essential feature. If you think this is the only safe default option in 2026 I’m sorry but please consider uBlock Origin. See how opinions on who to trust can affect what “most secure” means. Konform Browser removes many assumptions of trust. But not all; Everyone still comes with an assumed PKI after all and there exists a default for DNS.

    2: Since it’s ESR base it means new feature updates from Mozilla ~yearly instead of ~monthly. Still receiving security updates on the rapid schedule. No AI features out of the box.


  • Thanks! Adding Floorp should be straightforward if you feel like tackling it yourself as it’s “just another FF fork”. Adding a new browser consists of adding a new Containerfile for it. I guess Floorp might be most similar to Mozilla firefox out of the existing ones. PRs much appreciated for new browsers as well as any interesting queries to get more insight into data I can run on existing dumps and add to Report section.

    They have official PPA: https://ppa.floorp.app/

    For Brave got it running but didn’t yet figure out why it crashes as soon as I try to proceed with the onboarding. Judging by the probably unrelated error noise in the console, it might be trying something weird with a graphics driver or hardware sensor and not gracefully handling not having access to whatever it is 🤷 But didn’t even ldd or strace it properly yet so maybe just a missing library.

    There’s a lot that could be done but had to wrap up and publish somewhere.




  • I’m so glad you want to try!

    The problem with both that and Flathub is that I can’t seem to pass Githubs signup CAPTCHA whatever I tried (and yes I tried other browsers too lol). Besides, having my old account there arbitrarily blocked on phone number verification in the past, not feeling super keen on having users rely on them for updates, even putting aside whatever I feel about Microsofts and GitHubs role in the ecosystem in general…

    However, if anyone would be up for the literal push-part of pushing it up and wouldn’t mind collaborating a bit in the process, would be happy to make that happen together (or use your privilege if you’re motivated; it’s free software yo, just heed the license ;)). Issue thread

    I don’t think it should be too involved as the source repo and source tarballs are built in pretty much the same way as LW, which already has a derivation in nixpkgs. Didn’t look closer at that derivation but hopefully shouldn’t be much more than copying pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/librewolf and replacing some strings.


  • There is a longer discussion to be had about both what RFP does, how effective it is, and the relative impact on entropy of this particular feature.

    For now I will just say that this: Providing configuration for this serves the projects goal of user control and freedom. It should be up to the user to make that call. Us as developer shouldn’t unilaterally decide on behalf of everyone. We can’t think of everything and we don’t always know best. Of course we can still provide guidance and put what we believe is sensible as defaults. I find it odd to criticize empowering users in this way, in particular considering the status quo.

    Were it up to me, everyone should have Letterboxing on by default, probably with similar reasoning. I don’t see why you wouldn’t use it. Everyone enabling it would make us all (ever so little) less fingerprintable. Arguably more meaningful impact than dark/light-theme. And less of an accessibility issue. Even so, we still leave this configurable in the same way as the dynamic theming.

    You can also see this way of thinking reflected in allowing loading of your own add-ons from file and allowing userChrome customization. Probably niche power-user features with risks involved and sharp edges exposed but we are developers and maintainers of software, not your sysadmins1 or caretakers2.

    If you fundamentally disagree, well, not all software has to be for everyone. Probably there is already something else (like Tor Browser) that serves your needs and aligns with your philosophy better?

    1: …xcept… you want us to be your sysadmin? 👉👈 Call me when you close that seed round bb 😘

    2: Nope.




  • Went low-key public with our internal browser project by sharing here on the feddit. If you’re a dev, packager, Arch Linux user, or already build Firefox from source, this is for you1. More people using it becomes a shared privacy win. I humbly suggest that this is currently the most privacy-friendly general-purpose GUI browser out there1.

    Announce post

    Sources

    AUR

    1: Others can check back at a later date when perhaps there are more builds running and tested, and more people have looked over the code.

    2: Biased? I would never!