12
votes
Zen browser / chrome alternatives
I'm getting a little bit worried these days about the tracking features in chrome and was looking into Zen Browser. Does anyone here use it? Any thoughts?
Also looking for any simple non tracking browser alternatives!
I use Zen browser daily. It's great! I really like the visual style and customization, and I especially like that it's based on Firefox.
I used Zen for a bit and loved it. But I switched back to vanilla Firefox after they added vertical tabs and link peeking.
Zen was my daily driver for about 4-5 months, and I can appreciate how it operates for Arc refugees. When they started making workspaces something you couldn't turn off, I bailed. Personally, I just want de-bloated, hardened Firefox sans AI, which is what Librewolf is. Been using it all year with no complaints.
I used Zen for a while, built some mods, contributed to upstream, developed some tooling for mods, but Firefox added the features I really wanted, vertical tabs and groups, and had better performance and battery life on my borderline-performing machine due to some of the visual effects Zen used accidentally breaking some performance optimizations under the hood. It still feels like a very young project and I have an on and off relationship with tinkering with my daily driving tools.
I’d rather use Firefox than a fork like Zen because I don’t trust them when it comes to security. You’re worse off waiting for a fork to include security patches from upstream. Firefox isn’t going to accidentally ship a backdoor either.
Well that's disappointing (the response to it too).
The overall organization of Zen really vibes with me, and I love some of the unique features like split tabs, glance, and workspaces. Guess I should start trying to work up a solution for those in vanilla Firefox.
Glance is already available as link preview. Split tabs are Coming Soon™️. I’m sure that given enough time workspaces will land too.
The Zen team also seems better at attention to detail in UI/UX and fixing up rough edges that mainline hasn't touched in ages.
I tried bending vanilla Firefox to my will, primarily through userChrome mods, but I got sick of them never working 100% correctly and breaking frequently thanks to Mozilla's penchant for frequently rearranging the same handful of figurative deck chairs.
I really, really wish Mozilla would start taking deep user customization seriously again.
I recently wrote a comment about Zen that you can read here:
https://tildes.net/~tech/1q00/atlassian_acquires_the_browser_company_arc_dia#comment-gbxp
Basically I like it and use it instead of regular Firefox because it has a couple of neat and unique features.
Zen is my secondary browser. I had a stint of using Arc as my main browser, so Zen feels pretty good to me. Though mainline Firefox now has vertical tabs, I like Zen's implementation better.
If they can get its performance issues figured out I might make it my primary browser.
One benefit of Zen people haven't mentioned here is that they're much more efficient in their development than Mozilla, due to being a smaller team and project. If you report a bug or feature request to them, it doesn't take too long to respond or fix it, while Mozilla can leave your report unread for years. In fact, I think there have been multiple cases of Zen patching bugs that were in upstream Firefox for over 10 years.
I tried it, wasn't really a fan. Some of that might be because I am rusted in my ways. But in many other ways it is clearly still a beta and a skin on top of Firefox. For example I like having access to my bookmarks bar easily, this didn't work when I tried it initially, but the options were there. Extensions and having the icons available is another issue. It clearly is a very opinionated browser on the UX/UI and I don't really share that same opinion.
In the future I might giving it another go. But for now I am sticking with Vivaldi for now. One of the few Chrome based browsers that I feel like works for me and cares about their users. A comment I wrote about that browser a while ago.
Firefox would be my browser of choice, except for some issues most people like don't care about in relation to extension development.