Midori is a lightweight open source web browser based on Chromium and built with Electron. Although based on Chromium, Midori removes many services from Google and some privacy-related content. It aims to be fast, private, clean UI, extensible and functional.

Note: Midori was part of the Goodies component of the Xfce desktop environment and was the default browser on elementary OS “Freya” and “Luna”, as well as many other Linux distributions.

In 2019, the Midori project merged with the Astian Foundation, and then it has been completely revamped and switched from WebKitGTK to use Electron.

Since the latest stable version of the browser is still in 2020, many users feel that the project has stopped maintenance.

Recently, the official has brought some new news. First of all, the Midori web browser has not stopped maintenance and is still under continuous development; in addition, in the upcoming browser update, they plan to integrate their own open source search engine AstianGO into the browser middle. This is somewhat similar to Brave’s integration with Brave Search, but Brave Search is not open source.

In a Reddit post, the Astian staff said they plan to add an integrated open source search engine, known as AstianGO, in the next update of the Midori web browser. There are not many details about this development work at the moment, but Astian mentions:

We have implemented and developed a completely open-source search engine that does not use third-party APIs, does not store users’ IP addresses, and does not store search history. We call this search engine AstianGO, this search engine is developed in PHP, it’s self-hosted, although it doesn’t have an integrated update system yet, people can deploy it on their servers.

AstianGO search engine uses data from Google, Qwant, and Brave Search to provide results and is hosted in several countries such as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Romania, Netherlands, Sweden, etc. This ensures that users’ data does not always flow through one country.

At present, Astian has released the source code of the open source search engine AstianGO on GitLab. Users can also directly visit https://astiango.com/ to use the search engine, and try to search some content to verify whether the search engine is easy to use.