This disclaimer in large font would concern me:
A note on maintenance
This project will never make it past alpha, nor will it receive any bug fixes or new features that do not directly affect me (@trickypr). I am putting my energy towards a project using a different approach. For a rough guide to my reasoning, see this Mastodon post.
thereās better spinoff browsers, better maintained, better committed to privacy, and open source. itās pretty, but one could let floorp go.
I canāt lie when I say that this issue goes over my head a little. While I agree with you, I also agree with the main developer. I guess Iām just neutral on this topic.
I used to hate the name so much but just like this AWFUL instant coffee Iām occasionally forced to drink, itās grown on me 
Brilliant
sigh
Reminds me kind of what Red Hat tried to avoid, just rebranded simple forks without contribution to the source. I donāt know how much different Floorp is from Firefox, so cannot comment on if he or she is true to the words of own work. I donāt think the developer is complaining on forks that are more involved. Is Floorp really that different or does it only have different default settings and preinstalled extensions?
Floorp is not just different default settings and preinstalled extensions. It has tons of other features. You can kind of think of it as the Vivaldi of the Gecko-world (in terms of features). And yes you are right, the developer isnāt complaning about all forks, only a certain few that rebrand Floorp without proper attribution and not making any contributions either.
Like you I have no clue as to what Floorp does. I actually donāt care as I donāt use it. I just find it to be a very Microsoftish thing to do. I guess another question I would have is if they are producing their own code is that code being pushed upward and offered to FireFox?
Does Firefox team want the changes in the first place? Same question to Floorp. If they donāt accept everything, then they cannot blame others for making forks, even if there are only a few changes. Thatās the nature of open source in my opinion. But off course there is always some nuance to situations like these. Iām not a fan of it, but understand why it is being done (Floorp, Vivaldi, RHEL and so on).
Even if people do not make the contributions, they could just take it and add it themselves. The license āshouldā allow it and there is no shame in āstealingā (with proper attribution and licensing). There will always be bad thieves, but thatās the price to pay; on the other hand the the price to win, freedom, is much greater in my opinion. (sorry Iām rambling a bit)
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to ever use a proprietary browser. Itās downright foolish and irresponsible to do so. The browser is the most critical program on oneās computer, having access to oneās private data like no other program.
It is so critical that you may assume that any browser that has even one line of code that is not publicly available, has malware in that line of code. If you cannot build the browser yourself or if it is not built by the maintainers of your distro (people you trust unconditionally, otherwise you wouldnāt be using their distro), you shouldnāt use it.
Well i donāt!
ā¦but at least i contemplate and suffer about it.
@Kresimir Out of curiosity, what is your browser (or browsers) of choice?
I use my own build of LibreWolf.
Are there any opensource, pre-built browsers you trust or would consider using?
LibreFrog?
Iād use it.
Yes, packages firefox, chromium, and torbrowser-launcher from the official Arch repos (extra) are at least as trustworthy as Arch Linux is. If you are using EndeavourOS, that means you have total and blind trust in Arch package maintainers, so you may safely use whatever they package, as long as it is not proprietary.
Anything outside the official Arch repos should be thoroughly scrutinised.
librewolf from the AUR should be trustworthy, but itās not a binary package, so it will take a few hours (depending on your computer) to build. librewolf-bin is maintained by the same person as librewolf, and itās the people who develop LibreWolf, so it is probably as trustworthy (although there is no way to verify). If youāre paranoid, and have a good computer, build it yourself.
Vivaldi, Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, etcā¦ all have proprietary components and therefore should be instantly and without question dismissed as malware.