Questions, answered plainly
General
Is Fluorite a fork?
Yes — a direct one. Fluorite is a fork of an existing Chromium build, continued 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. See the lineage page for the full story.
Are there related builds?
Related builds exist that share the same lineage and are actively maintained across multiple platforms. If you want a ready browser today, use them 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.
Where are checksums?
Published alongside the artifacts on the download server. Verify before launching anything; a checksum you didn't check is decoration.