Konform Browser and other bits and bobs.

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2026

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  • Cool. But…, could you name those explicitly?

    Thanks for checking out! Not in the readme, because it would be a PITA to keep that up to date over time, especially when rewriting for new context each time. They are already covered in release notes and commit log1 for the curious. You can also look under patches/kon in the source git repo.

    This comes to mind.

    Could you please explain why anyone should consider Konform Browser over it?

    Am engineer not a salesperson or influencer. I guess that means at this early stage it’s primarily targeting the audience who are able/willing to make sense of and contextualize the given material themselves, or willing to take a leap of faith. The pros/cons vs other browsers is something I hope to leave to other users to talk about and share around. Would be cool to hear your thoughts, for example! Maybe this is relevant for some, though.

    Also, pull requests attempting to improve the documentation are very much welcome. Would be great to get more contributors involved and one doesn’t have to be deeply technical to write good docs.

    1: Can click the commit hash for a release under /releases and then xxx commits to list commits for specific release




  • It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.

    Agreed that would be nice. Closest you get conveniently from inside browser today is to switch temporarily to “Basic Features” preset for model downloads (then maybe restart for good measure) and switch back to “Core Security” preset for actual use.

    re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/

    I don’t think it will be directly bundled due to the list updates and some users will not want it so it should remain optional. That being said, will already be looking at packaging for NoScript so when that happens I think should be reasonable to do the same with up-to-date uBO.

    are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?

    Answered this here.

    Officially can’t/won’t due to Github being both unreasonable and a supply-chain risk. Anyone is free to do so independently, however. If done in responsible and reasonable way (don’t introduce breaking patches or leave users hanging weeks without security updates plz) could be supportive of such initiative whether done indepently or via Konform Codeberg.


  • Oh, thanks for bringing that up - that’s out of date and no longer true so I guess the readme does need an update1. While you are correct, the offline translations feature wouldn’t actually work when blocking its access to RemoteSettings server. There was also a bug (still present in LW) which prevented locally cached results from being used. As Konform Browser does have a strict policy of not initiating connections to “trusted” servers on its own by default and without explicit user consent, it made more sense to remove it than leaving UI for a completely broken feature until it could be done properly.

    Since that was written:

    • Bugs fixed in Konform so translations do work fully offline now
    • An about:welcome “onboarding” screen was introduced where user has 4 presets to choose from. 3 of them (all but Purely Private 🔒️) allow translations feature and 2 (✳️Basic Functionality and 🦊Just Make It Work) makes it default and enable the automatic downloads of models from Mozilla server like in FF.
    • about:translations unhidden and can be used for direct translations of direct input

    So in reality I would say offline local translations actually work better in Konform than in FF and other forks.

    In the future hoping to improve this further by redistributing the models as packages for separate installation on system. Then you can use them without needing the browser itself to download anything at all. Similarly to how it’s already done for spelling dictionaries and uBlock Origin.

    1: EDIT: Readme has been updated to be less out of date more closely resembling current state of differences.