Some time ago, a bunch of really smart people wanted to be able to modify software, so it can never be broken since they can fix it. Thus began open source, which is having a piece of software tell everybody exactly how to make it. Meanwhile, many companies don’t want people to modify their software, usually because they don’t want people easily competing with them and bankrupting them due to creating a better modification. Such software that isn’t open source is termed “proprietary”.

Floorp was one of these open source softwares. Some ambitious Japanese people modified Firefox, added some features and customizations, and named it “Floorp”.

Recently, these people decided, for whatever reason, to stop the public from being able to access some of the materials and configurations for making Floorp. They did this by creating a new “warehouse” to store these materials, sealing off the access to it, and replacing the original location of the now proprietary materials with a note that tells you the location of the warehouse you can’t get in.

(Hopefully that wasn’t confusing…)

The Firefox part is open source, but now some of the stuff they add to it is closed source. Similar to what Vivaldi does by having the UI closed source but the other parts open source.

It’s somewhat open source but now we don’t know what’s actually going on under the hood, they could stick anything they want in that private section and we’d never know what.

It’s an open source browser based on Firefox with additional features and configuration tweaks.

Except they recently made part of it proprietary and hid the source code for that, so most other people cannot actually build the same one.

They claim they will make that part open source too, eventually, and it is due to behavior of another browser: https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core/issues/62