Questions, answered plainly
General
Is Fluorite a fork of Cromite?
Yes — a direct one. Fluorite forks uazo's Cromite and continues that work with a security- and stability-first mindset: pinned upstream tags, clean-tree 42-day cycles, automated weekly security watching, and test gates before anything ships. The lineage goes back further too: Cromite itself revived csagan5's Bromite after its development ended around Chromium 108. See the lineage page for the full story.
Should I use Cromite instead?
Cromite, the upstream Fluorite forks from, is actively maintained, multi-platform and battle-tested — if you want a ready browser today across Android, Windows and Linux, use it with confidence. Fluorite exists for when you want that same lineage delivered through a fully automated release factory.
Why throw away the whole source tree every cycle?
Because long-lived trees accumulate invisible state: stale caches, half-reverted patches, toolchain drift. A tree you're not afraid to delete is a tree you can reason about. Each cycle's output is traceable to exactly one upstream tag plus one patch set.
Building
How much disk do I need?
Plan for ~120 GB free: the shallow src.git pack is roughly 6 GB by itself, dependencies add more, and official-config builds produce large output directories. The fetch script checks available space before starting and refuses to run short.
How long does a cycle take?
The sync is bandwidth-bound (parallel streams help); the official build is compute-bound and runs for hours on strong hardware. That's exactly why the weekly timer uses nice 10 and why there are only ~8–9 cycles per year.
Can I skip the tests?
Tests are opt-in via TEST_CMD; empty means no gate. But promotion without proof is just hope — wire up a suite before trusting artifacts.
Using
Why must my profile live outside the app directory?
The build tree is disposable infrastructure — deleted wholesale every 42 days. Anything you care about (bookmarks, sessions, passwords) belongs in a --user-data-dir well away from it. Upgrades then become "extract new version, repoint launcher", nothing more.
What happens when upstream ships a security fix mid-cycle?
The weekly watcher compares the pinned milestone against upstream fixes. On detection (exit code 10) it writes pending/REPORT.md, applies the update and rebuilds immediately. You don't wait for the next scheduled cycle for security fixes.
Is Fluorite anonymous/private out of the box?
Hardened is not anonymous. Fluorite reduces platform-level tracking surfaces and ships no extra telemetry of its own, but for high-threat models use Tor Browser. The same honest caveat Cromite and Bromite published applies here.
Where are checksums?
Published alongside the artifacts on the download server. Verify before launching anything; a checksum you didn't check is decoration.