16
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’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.
Yeah I remembered about link previews, but I think I still like Zen's glance a bit better. Link previews feel a bit slow (though I am aware you can disable the summary if desired), and I usually wish I could see more of the page than it shows you. In Zen, glance basically opens an ephemeral tab on top of your current one. So you can poke around for a few seconds and see what all's there, then quickly return to what you were doing when you're finished. I'm not sure I can articulate why that feels different than just opening a new tab, but it does. 🤷
That's awesome that split tabs are at least on the to-do list, though! I use that all the time in Zen.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
It's my daily driver but unfortunately I don't recommend it at this time. It is effectively a solo developer project, and is managed poorly.
On multiple occasions they have removed functionality to great compliants from the community. Their response has been a shrug and saying they're open to pull requests if someone wants to put in the effort to implement it properly. I do recognize I'm a power user and opinionated, but when +20 other users chime I think it's disrespectful to ignore or write off as a vocal minority.
But also, if this critique doesn't resonate or bother you, definitely give it a shot! As I said, I'm still daily driving.
They can on occasion be reasoned with, too. They briefly disabled the built in password manager until it was explained that that'd be A Generally Inadvisable Move..
If you are on MacOS, the Orion browser is great. It’s privacy focused and has nice features for reducing RAM usage while still keeping all of your tabs open.
Or, you know, Safari. I've been using it for almost a decade and have no complains. Plus, it's the browser that best integrates with macOS. (I wish I could use Firefox, but it's weirdly alien in macOS land.)
I would use safari, but my laptop only has 8GB of RAM, so it doesn’t work well with lots of tabs open. Safari is pretty memory efficient, but Orion has more memory saving features that lets me keep my tabs open.
I also like the built in ad blocker because I don’t really want to fiddle with finding a good one for safari. I tried Ad Guard, but it uses a surprisingly large amount of CPU and RAM.
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.
Vivaldi! It's a reworked Chromium base that makes stuff more secure and improves the memory handling. I routinely have 100+ tabs open and it moves just fine. Plus it has a ton more hotkey/customizability for power users. I made custom hotkeys for my search bar that lets me cue up things like Google Scholar, Wikipedia, eBay, and even the great circle mapper utility.
I'm on a Macbook and I've used Zen as my daily driver for ~4-5 months. However, I've very recently just switched back to regular Firefox. Zen is a beautiful browser UI/UX wise which I really loved. I never used any of the features they built in though except for vertical tabs and split tabs. Firefox recently introduced vertical tabs so I thought I'd try it out and I just switched back full time. I'm not someone who has a million tabs open so the workspaces/folder features were wasted on me.
I might give Orion another shot. I recently gave it a try again in the midst of writing this post and the compact layout is something I've wanted in a browser for a while! I like that Orion lets you install extensions from both Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately I'll be giving my Macbook to my mom for a while so I'll be messing around with the iPhone version of Orion for a bit instead.
Used Zen a few times on PopOS and Windows, been my main Browser there.
I installed the Flatpak and saw RAM leaking after suspend, then I ran the binary and it turns out the issue was either a Linux or a Zen one, not Flatpak.
Nowadays since Zen has no NixOS package, I use Floorp, until Orion becomes a thing on Linux at least.