I think I’ve finally found it: The elusive Firefox fork for my day-to-day needs. It needed to have sane defaults like Librewolf but also as user empowering as Vivaldi (as well as not being proprietary which is cringe).
Zen I believe accomplishes both of that. It’s a relatively new project but it does have active development with new changes added every release. Here’s the rundown:
- Licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the same as Firefox. So enjoy that warm feeling you get when using open source software that won’t pull the rug from under you.
- Follows Firefox release cycles: If a new Firefox version comes out, Zen is not behind.
- Instead of horizontal tabs, Zen only uses vertical tabs for navigation. If this is a deal breaker, then Zen isn’t for you :(
- Supports split view, workspaces, browser profiles, side panels, tab unloading (saving memory by deactivating a tab), theming, mods and everything else that base Firefox supports (like firefox sync).
- Cannot play DRM-protected content as of yet on Windows and MacOS (rare Linux W?) due to license fees. This is your netflix, your disney+, your spotify.
- No mobile version (nor does it seem to be planned), though firefox sync is still supported.
- Looks GORGEOUS. I never realized how ugly Firefox looks by default, esp on desktops like GNOME and KDE where it tries to integrate itself into the system theme.
- Performs FABULOUSLY: Optimizations from the firefox level to even providing an optimized binary executable for modern CPUs.
- SANE defaults like HTTPS everywhere, no link prefetching (where the browser loads links that it thinks you’re going to go to), uncluttered Firefox home.
- Probably more I’m not listing
Download here: https://zen-browser.app/download
How do I use Zen?
Well firstly, Zen doesn’t come with any extensions by default. So I made sure to chuck in my Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs, LibRedirect, etc. It also uses secure DNS by default with Cloudflare so you might want to turn that off (I have a DNS homeserver that does encrypted DNS through other means).
I also really like using the side panel to put my wiki sites and dictionaries in. I’ve only been using Zen for a week now and it seems to be my forever browser of choice.
what’s up with vertical tabs? it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones. is there any particular benefit beyond it just feeling better for some people?
also off-topic but I’ve heard that Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin and can actually make your browser more easily fingerprinted
it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones
It is a shock for sure when I first used it, but you get used to it since the vertical tabbing is integrated with the Zen workflow (split view, side panels). It also frees up some space for navigation since you’re able to collapse it.
Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin and can actually make your browser more easily fingerprinted
Interesting, I might have to look into this later
Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin
This actually applies to ClearURLs as well, there’s another URL tracking blocklist that can be added to uBlock Origin by adding the URL to the custom filters list.
what’s up with vertical tabs? it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones. is there any particular benefit beyond it just feeling better for some people?
I’ve always hated horizontal tabs. It’s one of the reasons why I started using Firefox way back in like 2006 because there’s a popular extension that gave you vertical tabs. Horizontal tabs suck once you have 10+ tabs open and I have 70+ tabs lol
Vertical tabs let you see more of a tab’s name while still displaying at least as many of them. (The downside is that they can only do this because they take up more screen space)
Tab cram. If you have a lot of tabs horizontally, they shrink/scroll and you can’t read any captions on them, just icons in the best case. But having tabs vertically helps a lot.
Another reason would be that you can have tabs for your tabs, essentially. If you’ve used something like Sideberry for Firefox (my personal favourite), it has a workspace feature, which means that you can toggle between lists of tabs in your browser.
I’m not that bad of a tab hoarder, but vertical space matters much more than horizontal space, at least for my usage pattern, and having tabs on the side also helps.
BTW, Firefox Nightly have just landed native support for vertical tabs that can be toggled in about:config (for now). Set both sidebar.revamp and sidebar.verticalTabs to true in about:config and you’re golden.
Edit: my dumb ass referenced Zen browser’s vertical tabs under the post about the Zen browser’s vertical tabs
I’ve been using it for a while and I like it a lot. Granted, I don’t have a use case that requires a specific workflow or features. I just doom scroll and watch youtube. I like how little screen space it can take in compact mode without hiding anything. And the user-made add-ons are cool.
So it’s just Firefox with more whitespace in the UI? I don’t see the appeal.
If you already know your ins and outs of the Firefox
about:configand policy templates and have set up your own comfy Firefox then Zen isn’t going to do you much good. But for people who use power user browsers like Vivaldi (or even shiver Opera GX) and want to find a Firefox equivalent that meets their needs ootb then Zen is a good option. I taglined it as the “Better Vivaldi to your Chrome” since the reason people would use a program like Vivaldi is for the UI enhancements. The issue of course is that both Vivaldi and Chrome are proprietary programs using a dominating web engine.Zen isn’t as hardened ootb like librewolf but I think it will bring a lot more people over to Firefox because of its presentation.
I’ve always been interested in Firefox forks but I cannot live without Sync so I’ve never tried them. I’ve also been interested in Vivaldi but it being proprietary held me back.
Does Sync work properly - Say, I use Zen browser on my Linux PC and then I’m able to access my tabs on my iOS or android Firefox browser without issue and vice versa?
Do I have to set it up somehow? What about history, bookmarks etc? You also mentioned add-ons not being enabled by default. But they are there, right? I just have to install them? Also, is the DRM-content playable on all Linux machines regardless of distro?
Is it safe - am I not giving my Mozilla ID to a third party?
Does Sync work properly
Yup Sync works the exact same on Zen as in Firefox since Zen is just Firefox at its core. You just sign in as normal and your tabs should be there
You also mentioned add-ons not being enabled by default.
There are no pre-installed extensions (as compared to Librewolf which has ublock pre-installed), all firefox compatible extensions are compatible with Zen minus the ones that obviously clash with Zen’s design like vertical tab extensions. Just install them from the addons store as you do normally.
is the DRM-content playable on all Linux machines regardless of distro?
Yes, Mozilla handles the Widevine licensing for Linux but you’re locked to a lower level of DRM (720p instead of 4K afaik). There are extensions that re-enable HD content that just spoof your user-agent (your browser’s identity) to mimic a Windows or Mac machine.
Is it safe - am I not giving my Mozilla ID to a third party?
- https://zen-browser.app/privacy-policy
- Zen is just Firefox with a heavy paint job, so all the security issues are handled by Firefox and not the Zen team.
I just installed it with Flatpak on my Fedora Macbook. I need to play around with it, but my 5-minute impression is so far pretty good. I don’t really get the point of the sidebar since I use the web search plugin for KRunner on my main desktop. I guess it’s good for people who don’t have KRunner since they could add a bunch of commonly used websites like Wikipedia and Google Translate.
Edit:
Split tab is very interesting. Not good for the laptop because the screen size is too small but it can have good use for my desktop.I still have to use tree style tabs to be able to organize my tabs in a tree structure, but I’m (mostly) able to hide the default tabs unlike Firefox where the horizontal tabs sitting awkwardly on the top alongside the tree style tabs.
Can someone tell me how to get popup notifications for Hexbear with Zen, thanks in advance.
