Ferdi, a fork of Franz that was born to follow a philosophy without restrictions

About a year ago, I was a happy Franz user. What happened was that, seeing that it was consuming more resources than what was good for my previous laptop, I started looking for alternatives to, finally, use most of the services in Firefox. But one thing is clear: if these types of applications exist, it is because they are of interest to many users and, if not, there will be no forks of the original application such as Ferdi.

At first, Ferdi looks like a clone of Franz: it has a very similar icon, the compatible applications are basically the same and we can find everything in the same position. But Ferdi was born to continue with the philosophy that Franz had in its beginnings: to offer us the possibility of using several web applications in the same window and that all this was free and without confusing us. And we remember that Franz has been improving, but also adding payment functions, such as customized services.

Exclusive features of Ferdi

• Icon and own colors.
• Eliminate counterproductive lag of full screen app inviting users to update.
• Remove the pages asking us to donate after signing up.
• Does not show the "Franz is better together" pop-up window.
• Eliminates the error that would incorrectly display the count of unread messages in some services.
• It makes all users Premium by default.
• Use Ferdi's API instead of Franz's servers.
• Option to change the server to a custom ferdi server.
• Option to use Ferdi without an account.
• "Private notification" mode, which hides the content of the notifications message.
• Password lock function to keep messages protected.
• Option to always keep individual workspaces loaded.
• Universal dark mode via the DarkReader extension.
• Option to automatically hide the menu bar.
• Quick Swap feature to help us navigate a long list of services (similar to Rambox Quick Swap).
• "Service hibernation" function that will automatically download services when not in use. This is undoubtedly one of Ferdi's best functions.
  
• "Scheduled Do Not Disturb" function in which we will not receive notifications (similar to Rambox working hours).
• CTRL + ← and CTRL + → shortcuts and menu options to go back and forth in the service's browsing history.
• Option to display a browser-like navigation bar on all services.
• Option to change the main color.
• "Portable" version for Windows.
• Process Manager to find resource-intensive services.
• The "npm run prepare-code" command can be used for lint development and code enhancement.
• Button to open darkmode.css for a service.
• Ability to change Electron's spell checker to improve application size.
• Enhance the "About Ferdi" screen to better view versions.
• Build file reduction to improve application size.
• Allows you to edit the «Franz Todo» server (pending tasks).
• Makes RocketChat self-hosted generally available.

Better performance than Franz

There is one of the above functions that particularly catches my attention: the hibernation. When a web application is not in use, it will go into hibernation, which will consume fewer resources. For this alone, I think it is worth trying Ferdi and leaving Franz. In addition, we can use the same user to enter the app, but only if we want, because Ferdi allows us to use the software without registering.

To install Ferdi, we have several options: we have a version for Windows, for macOS, in AppImage for any supported Linux distribution and on DEB package for Debian / Ubuntu based distributions. Taking into account that the AppImage does not add extra files and everything that this fork offers us, it is not a bad idea to download this package and give it a try.

Now, I'm sorry to say that Ferdi causes me the same disappointment as Franz: neither application offers official support for Twitter web. What do you prefer: Ferdi or Franz?