- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Right now is the best period of time yet for Firefox-based browser, especially when most alternative browsers are Chrome-based.
While there are a bunch of forks like Librewolf and Palemoon, they provide features mainly for power users like hardened privacy and tweaked user-prefs. A year ago the only fork I knew of, based on recent stable versions of Firefox and added productivity features on top was Floorp. I was very surprised at the hype and sudden popularity of Zen Browser in the past few months and have been curious why it grew so much faster than Floorp which has been around for much longer, look at the Github star graph: https://star-history.com/#zen-browser%2Fdesktop=&Date=. Zen Browser currently has 19.3K stars while Floorp has 6.1K.
Reasons I can think of are the following: heavy promotion of the browser by the devs and community on places like Reddit along with emphasizing its ‘zen’ philosophy, really fast development (it now has way more features than Floorp), and the Zen mods store, where you can install CSS mods.
What are your thoughts and reasons for Zen Browser becoming so popular so fast? (while its not mainstream, it did grow fast in among Firefox and power users)
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Zen doesn’t even support passkeys properly. I stopped using it almost immediately after trying it. I attribute it to good marketing and PR as an Arc alternative. Especially after Arc showed their hand very clearly regarding how they’d respond to Manifest v3 and then the recent security fiasco.
When everyone is in the market for a new Browser and you’re selling new ideas, you’ll find a lot of buyers. Hopefully from the ashes of Firefox someone comes out on top though. For now I’ll keep using my customized FF for everything, but I imagine that will have to change in the not too distant future.
As for Arc, I have heard so much praise for it as if it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.
Which it isnt
I would never use it as a personal browser, mostly because I really only keep 2-5 tabs open at a time for personal stuff. However, Arc has been an absolute game changer for work. Just a couple of reasons:
- The way it blend tabs and favorites prevents you from accidentally having multiple tabs of the same site open (though you still can have multiple when you want)
- Workspaces have very little friction to them, and you can control whether they are sandboxed or not, which helps greatly manage my “hats” at work
- Lots of smart keyboard shortcut options make zipping through common tasks a breeze
- Their “Tidy Tabs” button uses an LLM to group similar tabs together, which is a lifesaver during big research sessions
I hope their monitization plans succeed, because I’d hate to see this browser die.
While I’ve tried both, I am not sensitive to any of these trends. I’m just glad to see some alternatives that can fit anyone needs. That’s the power of the open-source.
Although I understand the reasoning beyond the language used in this post, I’m sad to read that hardened privacy is considered a power user thing.
Although I understand the reasoning beyond the language used in this post, I’m sad to read that hardened privacy is considered a power user thing.
What’s really sad is the fact you need to make a bunch of convenience tradeoffs and go well out of your way for improved privacy, and on a browser that already has a lot of built-in features for privacy. And a downside of using a Firefox fork is not getting the latest Firefox updates ASAP, you have to wait for the fork to update. It goes to show how privacy-invasive the web is.
Zen has the look and polish that makes it not feel like just another Firefox clone. It’s how I imagine people feel when using Microsoft Edge and Brave; there’s enough there to keep it perceptually separated from its Chrome base.
Floorp was great, but it didn’t bring much to the table that you couldn’t already tweak yourself with base Firefox. Heck, projects like firebuilder let you build something close with a couple CLI prompts.
I ended up liking it a lot. I don’t know why or how, but it (as Flatpak) uses less RAM and CPU than native (RPM) Firefox, so I’ve been enjoying testing it as daily driver for basic navigation. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but Zen works fine, has good proposals and is still improving and hearing the community. Well done and well deserved
Yeah because Flatpak firefox is damn insecure!
Please dont use it. Firefox devs dont care. Flatpak restricts browsers from spawning “user namespace” sandboxes for filesystem isolation.
Chromium uses a fork server (zygote) and breaks when it cannot spawn these sandboxes. So developers created zypak, which allows to isolate processes using bubblewrap, the Flatpak sandbox.
Firefox just runs without a sandbox, and doesnt have a fork server, so nobody cares.
Without process isolation, you have less duplicated content. This saves space but IT IS INSECURE.
Please use a non-Flatpak Firefox version.
There is no reason why a “Zen Browser” should use less RAM than Firefox.
I didn’t know about that, but I’m not using Firefox in flatpak, but as native (RPM). I just discovered it probably works faster because of unloading tabs, but I don’t have the time to check more about its memory usage compared to Firefox.
Thanks for the info:)
No clue why except i think people are mostly just really fed up with Mozilla making a non profit about everything but their browser. I could see a lot of people prefer the name and the willingness to try new stuff compared to floorp.
But really i think most of it is it’s very different from Firefox and people are tired of Firefox… But still hate chromium.
Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality, but just that more authenticated Microsoft accounts, real or fake, have pressed a button—where the more popular/normie/maintstream languages/frameworks get the most signal. You can also read anecdotes thah some folks use this as a bookmark to look at later rather than actually using or enjoying a project.
Free software doesn’t need to rely on a dubious value signal on a proprietary social media platform like MS Github.
Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality
Its funding track record is also pretty good it seems . no indication can prove a project is high quality, but it can help in deciding what to check out.
Maybe because Floorp (Additionally which is most likely a fork from a browser named midori), Uses a outdated version of firefox.
No, Midori is based on Floorp. https://github.com/goastian/midori-desktop
“Midori initially uses the Gecko/Firefox code under the Floorp Browser project.”
Ohhh, that would make sense, Shame the browser went this fate.
Zen has a superior UX out of the box but their decisions have been questionable. Recently Pinned tabs were changed to Essentials for seemingly no reason changing their behavior completely.
Pinned tabs still exist in 19a, and essential tabs carry over to other workspaces which pinned tabs don’t.
Or is this an upcoming change?
I’m sticking with Floorp for now. Faster development doesn’t mean it will be sustainable, but we’ll see. Or necessarily that all feayures may be good. More iant better. Brave and Opera GX have a bunch of features too.
But I’m using Firefox and Floorp as a variant because I want something that gets fundamentals right. And if Zen becomes huge, great.
While dev of Zen Browser is faster, I’ve faced way less bugs than in Floorp
Current ff has a vertical tabs sidebar pref in about:config (I currently use it that way)
I read the zen documentation (not much there)
I really don’t see anything special about it.
Their security sets insecure SSL as broken. OK. I set that years ago in about:config Does it use post quantum encryption? Does it use ECH? Does it . so many questions.
I’m good with my personally tweaked and hardened versions of Firefox/arkenfox.
To me this looks mostly cosmetic.
Normal users care about cosmetics though. If it doesn’t look modern, they’ll assume its functionality reflects that too, even if it doesn’t. And let’s be honest, even power users prefer nicer looking software if it doesn’t come at the expense of functionality, that’s why userChrome.css themes are so popular for Firefox. Zen browser looks like it’s making that a more seamless and intuitive process for users.
I’ll start believing or caring about any alternative browsers when I see a big influx of money comming to a browser project. Just grabbing a codebase and changing some settings and releasing it with a new name is not really creating or maintaining a browser. People keep thinking that it’s easy to maintain a huge project like a browser by just praying and volunteers.
Money isn’t important. Some complex software is, in fact, maintained by unpaid volunteers who feel strongly about the project. That doesn’t mean it’s easy (in fact it’s quite difficult to keep the lights on and the code up-to-date), but it is A Thing That Happens despite being difficult.
What is important is the size of the codebase (in the case of a fork, that’s the code either written for the fork or code that the fork preserves and maintains that isn’t in the original anymore), the length of time it’s been actively worked on, and the bus factor. Some would-be browser forks are indeed trivial and ephemeral one-man shows. Others have years of active commit history, carry tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of novel or preserved code, and have many people working on them.
What complex codebase is maintained by unpaid volunteers.
Yeah I think most complex and long-term OSS projects have “employed” contributors paid by donations or sponsorships (e.g. Linux, Blender, LibreOffice, …)
A whole bunch of non-user-facing projects providing vital libraries that are largely ignored until something blows up in people’s faces, as happened with openssl some years ago. Some of them contain quite a bit of code (for example, ffmpeg, which underpins a lot of open-source media playback software). Among browsers specifically, Pale Moon has been around for years, is maintaining a lot of code no longer carried by Firefox along with a fair amount of original code, and has no cash source beyond user donations, which might stretch to paying for the servers in a good month.
The projects with corporate sponsorship, or even a steady flow of large donations, are in the minority. There’s a reason the xkcd about the “project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003” exists.
you’re confusing importance with complexity
openssl is a vital part of the web, but it is a small tool
pale moon leverages the hundreds of thousands of person-hours put into firefox up until the fork. the work they put on their original code is negligible in comparison
there is literally no project led by unpaid volunteers that’s able to output the amount of work necessary to maintain a browser and keep it up to date with web standards, let alone add new features
openssl is a vital part of the web, but it is a small tool
You consider 61.7MB of source code “small”? (That’s for openssl 3.3.2, and may not include some rust code that isn’t in the gzipped main code package.) I think maybe you need to recalibrate a bit.
firefox is larger and more fast-paced
You just said “large”. I would consider any project with 10MB or more of source “large”. Firefox is certainly large by that standard, but so is openssl. If your standard for “large” is “has at least as much code as Firefox”, then according to you, the Linux kernel is a small project.
Meanwhile that one MacOS user (me) waiting for them to properly integrate with apple’s passwords app and passkeys:
I deal with an issue with Firefox where it causes my Home Assistant dashboard become non responsive if the tab is not the primary one always on screen. I think it’s something with the forced snoozing of tabs. I’ve tried other Firefox based browsers and face the same problem. So this leaves me with… Chromium based browsers. As a Linux user, it’s either Firefox or Chromium based. With that said, I have not had the issue with the Chromium base, but because it’s mostly consumed by Google, I reject it mostly.
I did find that Zen was very nice to look at, and they do have an opinionated way of setting up the tabs (I don’t care about the vertical tabs). They also seem to be wanting to roll out their own extension store? In the form of “Zen Mods” but are also cross compatible with Firefox Extensions so that’s good I guess. I use a rolling release (Arch) OS, so I do see a lot of updates to Zen, the devs seem to be really working on it. For now - I’m on Firefox dealing with the unusual Home Assistant thing. I’ve used Firefox since it was before version 1 so I’m a bit stuck in my ways. :)
I really wish that there was another browser engine there which I could use which supports the Adblocking and Bitwarden (My most important extensions). It’s a bit disappointing to see that Edge, and all other browsers have adopted the Chromium base. I am hoping that with the latest judgement and order against Google to sell off the Chrome browser, sticks and if so, that the new owner(s) will strip it of some of the garbage which has been forced on the code base. (Manifest v3 comes to mind). The only Chromium based one I tolerate on my system right now is Ungoogled Chrome and Vivaldi, who has said that they are resisting the Manifest V3 as much as they can and have a somewhat decent adblocking built in using their end. Even though I have DNS level adblocking, Ublock Origin fills the gap with some of the ads which gets past my end.
What I’d really like is LibreWolf level privacy protection whilst the browser is running but that allows me to retain cache, history etc but also encrypts everything locally when the browser is closed and is password protected and only decrypts everything when the password is entered.
Is that really a relevent attack vector in your day to day use, that full disk encryption wouldn’t cover? My browser is rarely closed when I am on the PC, so it would be accessible (because unlocked).
with linux and kde you could create an encrypted kde vault that’s mounted to your librewolf profile folder (and you can change librewolf settings to save history, cache, etc.)
if you don’t want to use kde, it uses cryfs in the background, which has a cli tool as well. unmount the volume after using the browser and profit i guess, though i do agree with the other commenter that this doesn’t make much sense in my head.
I like Zen so much I stopped browser hopping. It has sane defaults, vertical tabs default, and it’s x64_v3 optimized speed is nice. Default theming is nice, too.
Flatpak version is not v3 optimized, I think.
Correct, for Linux atm it’s mainly app image only for v3 versions.
Edit: for anyone using any app images, I highly recommend Gear Lever to manage them, including updates.
