Which Midori ? Legacy or New?

I see “legacy Midori” on the community repo, but dev stopped 3 years ago : GitHub - midori-browser/core: Midori Web Browser - a lightweight, fast and free web browser using WebKit and GTK+

I also see “Midori new” on AUR, this one looks like a more transparent Brave like browser : https://astian.org/

Why keep the old in official repo ?
What thoughts about the new one ?

Astian began to maintain and develop Midori since the end of 2019, always maintaining the pillars of light, fast and secure Midori, and as additional information, it respects privacy since it does not sell advertising, we do not sell user data and all our products and services are open source and auditable, Midori Web · GitLab here is our repo

Midori is from the Arch repositories. So…

You may understand you “So…”
I don’t.
Can you translate for a newbee ?

Manjaro inherits the Midori package from the Arch repositories. It’s not Manjaro maintaining that package. It’s Arch.

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Although you can use AUR packages on Manjaro, it isn’t the best scenario. I do run some, however, I know that things could go wrong. Manjaro is not Arch.

Good question.

Maybe next Spring arch will remove it. I understand that this is when they do house cleaning,

The Maintainers of midori at arch are “Orphan”.

The best place to get some background is archlinux AUR midori-git. The second comment by eclairevoyant, dated 11-25-22, points to an archived web page that talks about the direction for Midori. It goes something like, get rid of gtk/webkit, code for mobile and then use electron for desktop. But if you look at midori-desktop at gitlab, the code has been removed. If you go to the astian.org download they have an appimage and a deb with no links to the source. The URL from pamac info midori-git URL gets a 404.

The biggest selling point seemed to be lightweight. Are electron applications lightweight?

An itsfoss article:

Attention! Discontinued Project

The Midori browser we knew and loved has stopped its development. It’s been merged with Astian project who has launched Midori for Android. There is no Linux port yet. For now, do not use Midori.
Midori: A Lightweight Open Source Web Browser

So no source, lots of 404’s hhhhmmmm… :thinking:

I’ve done a chronological analysis of the midori-desktop project’s source code.

Here are my results:

Info from Releases · Midori Web / midori-desktop · GitLab



Release/Tag             Timestamp                   
Technology              Comment
----------------------  ------------------------
v-1.1.3                 2020-10-09T07:26:53.262Z
[Electron]              References https://github.com/wexond/desktop/releases
                        which was archived on 2023-06-04 by its owner

v-1.1.5-Precandidate-1  2020-11-23T02:51:45.564Z
[Electron]              Midori renovation uses Wexond as base
                        and reference to wexond/desktop removed

v-1.1.5-beta-2          2020-11-30T22:07:41.459Z
[Electron]              Midori renovation uses Wexond as base

v-1.1.5-beta-3          2020-12-01T01:50:29.617Z
[Electron]              Midori renovation uses Wexond as base

midori-desktop          2022-01-20T09:01:25.671Z
[QtWebEngine]           References https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
                        and is a fork of the [Falkon] browser

:memo: The above comments are condensed from the README.md documentation files in each compressed source file.

Info from Commits · master · Midori Web / midori-desktop · GitLab

Branch              Commit                      Deletions   Timestamp
----------------    ------------------------    ---------   ----------
master [default]    remove all code electron    1326        2023-04-22

There is no source code at all in the master branch itself.

Source code is downloadable at each Release/Tag stage as a compressed archive.

The Release/Tag source is the only place that documentation exists for the state of the midori-desktop browser. No source code is directly accessible via gitlab.

FWIW: It looks like astian has abandoned Electron for the midori-desktop in favor of QtWebEngine and has become a fork of the Falkon web browser, unless some other source code appears.

Hope this is helpful!

@stargazer @lsteeger Thank you for this : I should ask to change the title to “forget it” :wink:

I hear ya… :slight_smile:

I’m not a Midori user per se. It was a recent install on a VM of the minimal XFCE ISO that I encountered it, as the default browser. I found an annoying bug and entered this vortex — asking myself the same questions as yours. @lsteeger took it to another level with good documentation and flagged midiori-git in the AUR.

I ended up uninstalling Midori and will just use Firefox. I just need a browser to manage internal resources. If users search the forum they’ll find this Topic and hopefully it will help.

Totally agree, for any minimal iso, present a good default browser (i.e. firefox or chromium) or none and let the user decide.

I created an issue at the owner’s github for the midori-git AUR package.

He responded to feel free to issue a delete request.

I have done this. :frowning_face:

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