Implementing features from Mercury

[ThousandDemonDaggers]

Since it seems that Mercury adds many patches that Firedragon (Floorp) hasn't implemented yet, wouldn't be a good idea to implement them? Also, Mercury doesn't seem to be updated regularly anymore.

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List of patches included in Mercury

• Compiler modifications include AVX, AES, LTO and PGO.
• Disable all telemetry and reporting.
• Remove all debugging constructs and enable hardening by default.
• Enable backspace to go back, and GPU acceleration by default.
• Enable Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control.
• Disable Pocket, highlights, and suggested content on the new tab page.
• Restore top bar to ~ESR78 state with home button and developer button.
• Allow installing unsigned extensions.
• Branding changes
• Enable JPEG XL by default
• Implemented performance tweaks from BetterFox.

– Some help in creating these patches came from LibreWolf, Waterfox, FireDragon, PlasmaFox, Ghostery, and GNU IceCat.

– Any other code/patches are written from scratch by Alex313031.

Patch URLs to use when rebasing.

https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/source/-/blob/main/patches/ui-patches/firefox-view.patch

https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/source/-/blob/main/patches/allow-JXL-in-non-nightly-browser.patch

https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/source/-/blob/main/patches/windows-theming-bug.patch

https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/source/-/tree/main/patches

https://github.com/ghostery/user-agent-desktop/blob/main/patches/0018-Ghostery-Theme.patch

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Source: https://github.com/Alex313031/Mercury/blob/main/docs/PATCHES.md

[dr460nf1r3]

Thanks for the suggestions!

• Compiler modifications include AVX, AES, LTO and PGO.

That's more of a packaging thing, and we do have some of it already (see here or here for example. Iirc AVX was part of x86_64_v2/3 ? If I'm correct, we can't do that since it would break the browser for everyone with older machines.

• Disable all telemetry and reporting.

As far as I'm aware, we already disable most (or all) of it.

• Remove all debugging constructs and enable hardening by default.

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=firedragon#n140

• Allow installing unsigned extensions.

#99 (comment)

• Implemented performance tweaks from BetterFox.

https://gitlab.com/garuda-linux/firedragon/settings/-/blob/master/firedragon.cfg?ref_type=heads#L677

[ThousandDemonDaggers]

Great to know! It is definitely a project to follow for additional features to implement, seems that in the last days the dev returned, so maybe it is going to be updated more regularly and will add more features down the line.

That's more of a packaging thing, and we do have some of it already (see here or here for example. Iirc AVX was part of x86_64_v2/3 ? If I'm correct, we can't do that since it would break the browser for everyone with older machines.

Not sure about it. Maybe an approach like Zen Browser (another project that I really suggest to follow to implement features) could work for this. They provide two packages, one for newer machines and the other one for older machines.