22 ms·

Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

828 points by femou 2y ago

imagetic 2y ago
My download was corrupt and macOS threw it in the trash. That's a first.
- wlonkly 2y ago
  Same here -- I tried the x86 build as well with the same result.
gsimons88 2y ago
Does anybody have insight into how this compares to Brave? In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd.
- Kokouane 2y ago
  They only compared to Firefox-based browsers which does make sense. Most people are already firmly on one side of the Chromium vs FF engine debate. Compared to Brave in what terms? Speed, not sure, but Chromium is known to be better. As far as I know, Brave doesn't allow split tabs or workspaces though.
  - NayamAmarshe 2y ago
    Brave now has split tabs in the latest nightly iirc. Not sure about workspaces, is it like profiles?
    - Perz1val 2y ago
      Seems like workspaces are just a different UI for tab grouping, some ppl may prefer it. For me both are usable, but both are just a partial remedy for people that keep too much tabs opened
- mrweasel 2y ago
  > In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd If their target audience is disgruntled Firefox users that makes a ton of sense. I would not consider replacing Firefox with a browser based on Chrome/Chromium. It's not that I think it a bad rendering engine, it not, but I don't like the mono-culture that has been promoted and would like to avoid contributing to it, if I can.
  - netbioserror 2y ago
    I still don't understand this "browser engine monopoly" argument. Engines are the most difficult part to build and coordinate around. WebKit is open source and gets contributions from across the industry. It would make sense for most people to coalesce around that single target. The browsers built around the engine are the feature-filled interfaces people care about and where competition should happen. The engine has no opinions about tracking or tabs or built-in services. As soon as we argue we need unique engines, there are now multiple competing standards for developers to target. In fact, I'd bet that future engines that cite issues with WebKit as their motivation for a fork or a from-scratch rewrite will start using the tagline "WebKit-compatible" because that standard is so important.
    - DHPersonal 2y ago
      The issue with a single browser having dominance is that the largest contributor to that project doesn’t just control the project, they control the Web.
    - mrweasel 2y ago
      > It would make sense for most people to coalesce around that single target No it wouldn't. Even the OpenSSH project has states that they'd prefer that more SSH implementation where around, due to security concerns. Bugs in OpenSSL where/are a serious issue, because of it was almost a monopoly until HeartBleed. Having a single rendering engine be 95% of the market is not a good option in terms of overall security for the internet. The rendering engine in Chrome is Blink, which is a fork of WebKit. Safari, GNOME Web and DuckDuckGos macOS browser still uses WebKit. Blink and WebKit is going to share some of the same issues, as they come from the same codebase, but they are two separate rendering engines at this point.
bionsystem 2y ago
All of those are features I love in Vivaldi. If it matures it will be a very welcome open source replacement.
- PikachuEXE 2y ago
  I use Vivaldi too. Will try this one out to see how it compared to Firefox
- aezart 2y ago
  I've been looking for a Vivaldi replacement as well, due to the looming manifest v3 stuff. Hopefully this, or another project like it, works out.
  - adhamsalama 2y ago
    Try Firefox with the Sideberry extension.
a2128 2y ago
It's sad they don't link it clearly but it's available on Flathub if you're on Linux: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.zen_browser.zen https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.zen_browser.zen
redkoala 2y ago
Vertical tabs and privacy focused implementation gives me a good combination between the Arc browsing experience and the privacy protections that Mullvad browser (or private mode Firefox) deliver.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  Yeah I'm keen to try Zen to see if they've nailed the tab/workspace UX in the way that Arc has. I don't like Arc's decline into slow AI features and growth hacks, but some of the core functionality is really nice.
- willi59549879 2y ago
  I was very surprised with selection if the search engine after install. None of the browsers I tried do that. I quite like the vertical tabs also the browser is visually appealing
commercialnix 2y ago
I use Sway (an i3 clone for Wayland), so these "split views" and "workspaces" are not appealing to me. Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do not forwardly present writings on how they do these things, leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and there but not much more.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  I'm a Sway user as well but I still find value in features like workspaces, tabs, and split views in certain apps even though they are all also features in Sway. Sometimes a particular split (or any of those other things) can itself be a context I want to switch to in part of my current view. Rather than individually orchestrate that from wherever the components are into my current view it can be nice to define that relation more directly via something like this. Not saying such features in apps must also be appealing to you as well or anything equally silly, just whether or not they are appealing is more hinged on that base question of whether you like the idea of nested organizational structures than whether or not your window manager has a similar tiling feature.
  - commercialnix 2y ago
    [flagged]
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  I’ve been using the sway family of window managers for nearly 20 years! (First ion2, then ion3, then i3, and now sway.) In all this time I’ve briefly used native tabs but mostly now use windows without title bars or any other decorations in split mode all of the time. Most of the day I simply have a terminal running tmux on the first workspace with vim in the first tmux window, shells in the others, and a browser on the second sway workspace. Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if they all deferred to sway. I’m just not sure how to do that well with easy switching between windows and I don’t know if vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?
sirodoht 2y ago
macOS says "“Zen Browser.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Bin." :(
- weikju 2y ago
  Probably isn't notarized. Right-click the app and open, or use the terminal: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app edit: turns out they are describing this process here from a link on the macos download page: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately, perhaps it needs a better title. Also while I understand some people have moral objections to the 100 dollar/euro registration fee, clearly a lot more than that has been spent in time to get the application to this stage, almost all apps for macOS distributing like this are notarized now, and with such a slick marketing page it just feels weird to then not spend a relatively small amount of money to make this immediately far more accessible. The instructions aren't hard to follow, but still make trying it out 10-100x harder. Also it's tricky to get donations for something that literally prevents people using the application, no one is going to donate for the registration fee before even trying it, and once they've gotten through the installation process there's no incentive to donate for that anymore.
    - weikju 2y ago
      > The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately, perhaps it needs a better title. yes I found that awkward as well
    - tadfisher 2y ago
      To be fair, requiring the developer 100/eur per year in perpetuity to avoid a dialog literally telling the user to drag the app into the Trash feels a lot like extortion.
0x2a 2y ago
Looks like it supports Firefox extensions such as uBlock Origin as well. Surprised the website didn't mention it. Wonder if this still applies: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- rocketvole 2y ago
  I mean, it's a firefox-based browser. Is there any reason why it wouldn't support firefox extensions?
  - 0x2a 2y ago
    I thought it might be similar to Orion based on the submission title, but it looks like a rebranded Firefox (which is great). This is what Mozilla should be doing.
hysan 2y ago
Seems… quite lacking in details? It makes some pretty bold claims but doesn’t explain how it achieves things like better performance. Their docs are also pretty empty.
- dao- 2y ago
  Here are Firefox about:config preferences they tweak for performance: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd443105b4606a4dc9e5733a9ad5/src/browser/app/profile/better-fox.js#L13-L59 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44... I also found this somewhat funny: # Edit: ok, ill remove it, goodbye top #1 on fastest browsers benchmark :[ # ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd443105b4606a4dc9e5733a9ad5/configs/common/mozconfig#L102 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
- dnpls 2y ago
  The website is so bare, I'd like to see a list with all the major features and some screenshots before downloading anything.
bityard 2y ago
Seems like the features they promote on the marketing page are ones that Vivaldi has had for quite some time. I'll probably give it a try but when I gave up on Firefox, one of the main reasons was that many of the sites I visit aren't tested on Firefox due to the low market share and are broken in subtle ways.
- getcrunk 2y ago
  Like what? Aside from google and Apple being actively hostile to Firefox I rarely have issues
  - Yeri 2y ago
    100% and if I have issues it's an extension (like ublock or privacy badger)
    - dimator 2y ago
      These two are the culprits every time a page has issues on Firefox for me.
bpbp-mango 2y ago
Split tab is cool. Couldn't import data from firefox. Quite slow to launch. Profiles are buggy, the name gets lost and it keeps launching the welcome wizard. looking forward to seeing this mature
riperoni 2y ago
Firefox with some extras might he nice, but the structure of that web page raises the question: Who is the target audience? That website has so many oversimplified marketing claims that are about security and customization. It seems wholly undecided if the target audience is people who fall for buzz words or someone actually interested in quantitative improvements over Firefox. And yet the comparison is just checkboxes and not even including base Firefox. How about bar graphs for comparison and some actual pictures of the advertised customization, layout and workspaces? To me this still feels a little shady, even though the features seem nice.
jszymborski 2y ago
This website mentions LibreWolf which I've recently switched to. It's truly great. Takes care of all the decrapification I do to a fresh FF install while keeping up with the upstream security updates. Feels like how FF should feel imho.
dartharva 2y ago
I don't know why but websites always feel downgraded with Firefox and its descendants. Long load times, incomplete/failed loads, bad font rendering, buffering.. It feels evident that webmasters only care for compatibility with Chrome et al. It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.
- winter_blue 2y ago
  I use Firefox a lot (and occasionally Chrome), and I haven't had any issues with Firefox. I've been pretty happy with it.
- frosting1337 2y ago
  While I agree that develops really only care for Chromium compatability, I've not really noticed any issues with Firefox, except with Google sites every now and then (YouTube in particular).
  - dartharva 2y ago
    Yes, Youtube is the main irritant for me as well.
    - mariusor 2y ago
      When it comes to the websites belonging to the competition, I feel like it's unjust to blame Firefox instead of, in this case, Google.
      - dartharva 2y ago
        Google is ironically a key sponsor of Firefox.
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    Weirdly, I've had to install the full Google Chrome because the Chromium has been problematic. Can't remember details, but I think MS Teams was one example.
willi59549879 2y ago
I quite like the zen browser. It is privacy focused but also visually appealing. The feature that I like best, is that the browser does not take up a lot of space for itself. Even the top bar can be hidden. That way most of the screen is there to show the website.
- wmstack 2y ago
  This is the information I was looking for. Does it have the Arc style search box/dialog/palette that pops up when you need it?
  - willi59549879 2y ago
    there is no search button. but you can search in the url bar, which will show you a button to switch to the corresponding tab
nxtcoder17 2y ago
how is it different than [floorp](https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en) ?
- stackghost 2y ago
  I suppose it doesn't have a name I'd be embarrassed to tell my grandmother about.
- latexr 2y ago
  Every time I see a question like this on HN, the answer can be found out with minimal effort. If you want to recommend some relevant alternative you use, just be honest and say that. If you really want to know, it would be reasonable to spend twenty seconds on the page, there’s a comparison table.
- nusl 2y ago
  You can determine this yourself quite quickly by visiting each site and comparing them.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsm9lu/im_doing_a_new_firefox_based_browser_im_focusing/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsm9lu/im_doing_a... Reddit launch of the project about 4 months ago. Fantastic project and already very polished browser. Really enjoying it!
Mashimo 2y ago
> Optimized for peak performance What does that even mean?
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  I interpret that as they have tweaked the configurations with the performance in mind, meaning their goal when customizing the browser has been to get as much juice as possible out of the browser.
  - MrAlex94 2y ago
    Realistically, compiler flags and config flags have had diminishing returns on Firefox builds for a few years now. Mozilla are very quick to update the toolchain now, compared to before as well as taking care of curated CPU-dispatch where necessary.
Hard_Space 2y ago
Does anyone know if Zen identifies itself as 'Firefox' at program-level when running on Windows? This is the biggest mistake that FF forks and offshoots make, since it makes it impossible to run Firefox and the derivative work at the same time.
- jeremiahlee 2y ago
  Just tested with Zen v1.0.0-a.26. User agent reports: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0 Exact match with Firefox v129.0.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
  - ReadCarlBarks 2y ago
    He's not asking about the User-Agent string sent to websites. He's asking about how the browser identifies itself to the Windows operating system. According to him, other forks say simply "Firefox," which makes it impossible to run them alongside the official Firefox release.
- autoexec 2y ago
  Shouldn't be a problem if you use the portable version of one (or even both if that's an option).
widdershins 2y ago
Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I will write one. I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up! My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.
- dao- 2y ago
  Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this. I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable. For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient. Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
  - Croftengea 2y ago
    Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?
    - dao- 2y ago
      We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.
benreesman 2y ago
We don’t need those investors: https://youtu.be/kKAue9DiHc0 https://youtu.be/kKAue9DiHc0
maelito 2y ago
Firefox's container addon is one of the features that make me love firefox. But they could be integrated better. I'll try Zen.
ammar-DLL 2y ago
i wish if this made in gtk4 or qt6
raghavbali 2y ago
the browser wars are heating up again! nice
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  The browser window chrome[1] wars* 1:(As in the pre Chrome meaning of the word)
ramon156 2y ago
While I don't condone complaining for the sake of complaining, I really don't see why I would use this. Every argument feels very "floatey". When I think of browser devs, I don't think about fancy UI, and blazingly fast speeds! I think about engineers who know what they're talking about. I've never heard of floorp, and the arguments against librewolf are silly. On top of that, some of these "features" like themes, profile switching are already in FireFox. So again, why would I choose Zen? I don't see how this project adds any value to the very mature FF, it's just piggybacking imo.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Sometimes (not necessarily here) just a better UI for existing features is enough to make a project succeed.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    One relevant example being Firefox, which started in exactly that way. Hiding some features from the overly-featureful Mozilla and focusing on the basic user flow.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Perz1val 2y ago
  The whole thing looks like the "new month, new JS framework" situation
tcsenpai 2y ago
I used Arc a lot back when I used MacOS. Was definitely a pleasing experience. I missed it a lot since I switched to Linux/Firefox. I just set up Zen with all my extensions and bookmarks, it behaves very well: let's see if it stands the trial of time, but very nice work. I like the UI
- adhamsalama 2y ago
  Have you tried the Sideberry extension?
  - tcsenpai 2y ago
    Nope. I see it is a vertical tab extension: will try it!
grumblepeet 2y ago
Sadly didnt run for me on Windows on this Arm laptop although in mitigation I didnt try that hard & was in a hurry. I might have another look at it later. Uninstalled for now.
mrweasel 2y ago
Someone pointed out to me that you can set eBay as the default search engine. That seems like a weird option. There can't be many that primarily uses their browser to access eBay, though I wouldn't rule out that people with this preference exists.
- biugbkifcjk 2y ago
  Maybe they get some royalties by having it as an option?
- nyanpasu64 2y ago
  Stock Firefox also allows setting Amazon and eBay as a default search engine, and I wonder if this is related to Amazon being a sponsored shortcut on the new tab page.
- autoexec 2y ago
  I wish you could just set the default search engine to "none". I just disable it eventually anyway, but it still leaves a bunch of garbage behind, like having "Search <whatever> for <blah blah blah>" in the context menu.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
I got a weird error when trying to run the app from within the .DMG on ARM Mac, in case anyone who can look into it is reading. It said "Zen Browser" is damaged and can't be opened, you should reject the disk image. edit: it's a known thing to do with Apples security, workarounds in step 3 here: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
- SigmundurM 2y ago
  Per their documentation [1], you have to bypass MacOS's gatekeeper. [1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-macos#step-3-bypass-gatekeeper https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-macos#step-3-byp...
- ulimn 2y ago
  I hate this about MacOS. It happens seldom enough for me to forget about it and every time I have to search the web for the solution. Thanks for posting the steps.
- causal 2y ago
  Reading the discussion, I see the developers intend to never sign their OSX package. This is a pretty big red flag for me, shows that the developer isn't really serious about supporting OSX. Too bad, I was excited by the idea, but this is just unprofessional and I really need to trust my browser.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    > this is just unprofessional Or they just prefer to not go out of their way to support the walled garden that is the Apple ecosystem. Principles beat professionalism any day for me.
    - causal 2y ago
      Then don't claim to support it
anon23432343 2y ago
One thing almost all arc clones dont get right and I talked with other arc users about this is that arc when surfing has no ui besides the border no top bar not tabs you can hide everything if you want to. I downloaded Zen and what do i see a top bar which I can not hide or at least I can not find how to do it.
- anon23432343 2y ago
  Okay I found it but its wanky at best. how do i show the topbar once its gone? I get that this ia an alpha but yeah going back to arc feels much smoother
- joshjob42 2y ago
  Activate Compact Mode in the settings.
Alifatisk 2y ago
First we got Floorp, now we got Zen. Love it! I hope they make it available through Chocolatey and Homebrew like Floorp. I really like that Zen offers two options, a setup wizard and a portable binary.
replete 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
braggerxyz 2y ago
Hmm, doesn't appeal to me. There is nothing over stock FF which I would consider important for me.
thinker5555 2y ago
I've seen the "workspaces" thing in a few different browsers now. I know Vivaldi and Arc have them, and it sounds like it's a separate thing from profiles, but I don't quite grok what the difference is between workspaces and profiles. Can anyone help enlighten me? If you use both workspaces and profiles, what do you do differently between them?
- _benj 2y ago
  I use workspaces in Vivaldi and they are pretty much a set of tabs that I can switch as a set, but all under the same profile. As an example, in my dev workspace I have GitHub, localhost, and a few other things I might need. In another workspace in have Google calendar, Jira, gmail, etc… I can switch workspaces and it will switch all of the current tabs in my browser. But, I’m logged in, say, in the same GitHub or Google account across workspace. Profiles on the other hand (I’ve used those on Arc) change where you are logged in… so I can be logged in to my work gmail on one profile, and to my personal gmail on another. Personally I don’t find profiles that useful just for the fact that I simply use different browsers for personal and work… but a use case for profiles is, for example, to be signed in as admin and user to your local dev web application and test things between the two just by changing tabs instead of having to logout and login
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- protomolecule 2y ago
  One might think of them as virtual desktops.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    Could I think of profiles as virtual desktops too?
    - lysp 2y ago
      Different user logins
layer8 2y ago
Whenever I read “beautiful” in marketing copy, I’m immediately put off. It’s so presumptuous and conveys vanity. Moreover, users may prefer their software to be utilitarian, and in any case are likely to have different opinions on what constitutes “beauty”. For that aspect: Show, don’t tell. If people do find it beautiful, then they don’t need to be told. And if they don’t, then telling them is unlikely to change that.
- hoistbypetard 2y ago
  I don't find it off-putting. I may or may not agree that the software is beautiful because, as you point out, people often have different opinions on what constitutes beauty. All the same, I find it useful to know that the authors of the software consider "beauty" one of their goals. And beauty does not preclude utility.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  I read it the opposite way: - I feel more passion from the author. - I value the pride they show in their work. - I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful software will actually report it's less buggy. The problem is when someone makes appearances more important than being useful. But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt. We need more browser diversity.
  - gexla 2y ago
    How do you know it was one of the developers who wrote this? Maybe they hired someone to create the site and the content. Granted, the site is in the repo and you can see who committed the assets. But that still doesn't tell you who originally wrote it.
    - billsmithaustin 2y ago
      You're suggesting one of the developers went through all the trouble to create a browser, then allowed someone to add assets to the repo without the developer reviewing them first?
anotheryou 2y ago
Any difference besides the UI to using sideberry with containers? E.g. seperated history suggestions or something?
- ikari_pl 2y ago
  definitely not any of the differences that make Arc attractive (new windows aren't portals to the same tabs, cmd+t doesn't open a tab/command bar, search doesn't turn into AI search...)
account42 2y ago
What is it with modern software and ungoogleable names. Make up something unique instead of just using short english words FFS.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I've been wanting split view in FF for a long time, so I'm going to try this right now And I know somebody, somewhere, is going to argue that it should be the job of the desktop. I disagree. I don't want to have to create each context I want things to exist in, and manipulate that carefully. I like automatic context. That's why I like tabs in my browser and not a thousand windows. And that's why I enjoy my split views to be inside the tabs I just created.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  I use vertical tabs, so I don't want 2 windows with tabs, I want 1 window with tabs-1stview-2ndview
- discardedrefuse 2y ago
  Mozilla maintains a Firefox extension that does split view in the browser. Its called Side View. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/
  - butz 2y ago
    "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing." What?
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      I’m sure that you can piece together how this could happen.
    - slenk 2y ago
      A lot of legitimate Firefox Addons say that. Just means Moz can't manually review every single extension if they want to allow their users a good extension experience...unlike developing Chrome extensions
      - tredre3 2y ago
qurashee 2y ago
"The only limit is your imagination" is a direct reference to zombo.com for me
giancarlostoro 2y ago
I have been using Firefox since after 2004 (I'm not sure if it was 2005 or 2006) and while I love the browser, I wish they would invest moreso in just making it less cluttered. One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is get rid of the stupid gaps next to the URL bar. Every. single. time. It really angers me. Who wanted that? Do people leave it on because they can't figure out how to remove them? We had a browser aiming towards being a full on Rust application, and I was excited and cheering that on, not because it was Rust, but because the focus by shifting to Rust was security and speed. Now I'm not sure the focus. I like how sleek this browser looks, and the "themes" seem to target very specific needs of minimalizing the UI which I also appreciate. I'll have to pull this one down for my Linux box to try it out.
- someone4958923 2y ago
  > One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is get rid of the stupid gaps next to the URL bar. Every. single. time. I THIS! This is the first thing I do after installing firefox. Nice to see I'm not the only one :)
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    I can't go 1 minute with that thing turned on, it drives me crazy.
gpm 2y ago
femou are you the author? https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/tree/main/src/browser/base/content https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/tree/main/src/browser... has a submodule pointing to https://github.com/zen-browser/components/tree/dab7fd0b2fbf2a3871d09306365e60fe5c0c17a1 https://github.com/zen-browser/components/tree/dab7fd0b2fbf2... which isn't public... I assume that's an oversight.
- Izmaki 2y ago
  Woops.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
brianzelip 2y ago
Finally something not chromium!
eddyg 2y ago
The most game-changing thing for me about Arc has been Air Traffic Control. I have spaces set up my various web-based apps, and previously they would be scattered among my dozens of browser windows. Now, the tabs of each web app are beautifully contained in their own spaces, thanks to ATC. Any idea if Zen supports this? And ctrl-tab for quickly cycling between recent tabs (even across Spaces)?
mazugrin2 2y ago
femou, are you affiliated with Zen? Do you know if there are any plans to add support for ARM users running Windows or Linux?
jeremiahlee 2y ago
Website getting hugged to death for a second day. Direct link to downloads from the GitHub releases: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/releases https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/releases
causality0 2y ago
Someone want to explain what "based on the Firefox engine" means? Is it a fork of Firefox or do they think I'm too stupid to know what Gecko is?
- Kokouane 2y ago
  Not a fork, it is just based on Gecko from what I can tell on their GitHub. To be fair, Zen is clearly targeting a regular audience who most likely do not know what Gecko is.
remedan 2y ago
I really like the UI! I use Firefox with Sidebery and the top tab bar hidden via userChrome.css, which is kind of a hassle. Zen supports that kind of layout out of the box. I'm very happy to see a new modern browser not based on Chromium. Will definitely test drive it to see if it's worth switching to.
- hodanli 2y ago
  i really like the hierarchy in sidebery
jedisct1 2y ago
Do people really care about the engine being used under the hood? From a user perspective, I see no difference between Blink, Webkit and Gecko. And when there is, it's a website that has only been tested on Blink, or uses features not available elsewhere.
- rocketvole 2y ago
  traditionally no, but adblocking on firefox has been traditionally better and chrome(and therefore chromium) is about to break many adblocks
- tjoff 2y ago
  Yes, I care deeply about diversity in the browser land. Luckily Gecko also performs the best for me.
shafyy 2y ago
Looks promising. How do you plan on being financially sustainable?
chown 2y ago
I've recently started using Arc mostly out of FOMO and there are parts that I like and parts I don't. I have been a Firefox user for a long time before that so glad to see something similar that's one of the major priorities is the aesthetics and I very much appreciate that. I tried to use it on my macOS Apple Silicone and got an error about it being broken and macOS suggested to trash it. Not sure if it is a bug issue. Will come back and try it again though to give it a second chance :)
- sparky_ 2y ago
  This super unhelpful error is sometimes the result of trying to run an unsigned or developer signed binary on Apple Silicon. Try `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine program.app`, then open it by right clicking on the app, and selecting 'Open' while holding option + command.
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    Bypassing Gatekeeper (the binary signing process in macOS) does not seem like a good idea when downloading apps off random websites.
    - eitland 2y ago
      I always run everything through virustotal first. (I should probably add that this is step two in my process: step one is to be very cautious and not download most things in the first place.)
    - sparky_ 2y ago
      Given the audience on HN, I think we can presume any readers of my comment are not trying to execute completely random untrusted binaries. There are legitimate cases when you need to do this to run a binary you trust, but the system doesn't.
- causal 2y ago
  +1 on Apple Silicon build being damaged. A lot of users that care about aesthetic are going to be on MBPs and they're all blocked right now.
chrisabrams 2y ago
I tried downloading this for MacOS Silicon and was told the dmg was damaged :/ Guess I'll wait a little bit for things to iron out.
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  It's not damaged, read some other comments about the workaround for this.
upcoming-sesame 2y ago
Images on the landing page look very pixelated
lordofgibbons 2y ago
I'm very interested! Before I adopt, could you please share what's your business model?
lagniappe 2y ago
“Zen Browser.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should eject the disk image. Current MacOS on M2
- ObscureMind 2y ago
  cd /Applications && xattr -d com.apple.provenance "Zen Browser.app"/ && xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "Zen Browser.app"/
  - lagniappe 2y ago
    I appreciate it, but I'll wait. When you enter a restaurant or hotel, and the lobby is disheveled, the parts you can't see likely won't be of a higher standard. Not for me yet.
ertucetin 2y ago
Why are there so many new browsers these days? Is there really that much demand for them? Considering that creating one is very hard and requires a team.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  The situation is pretty bad, where there are only two browsers: an ad-company controlled one that is making life harder for ad-blockers, and Firefox which is… fine, but somehow both stagnant and unfocused. So, the opening is there, can’t blame people for trying to fill it. OTOH this is just a Firefox fork advertised as a new browser.
  - joshmarinacci 2y ago
    Don’t forget Safari. Essentially there are three browser engines that all browsers are built on. The only engine that is truly new in the last 15 years is Servo. (And maybe Ladybird)
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      lol, I posted the comment from mobile safari but didn’t think of it. Eh, closed source software doesn’t count, haha.
ebri 2y ago
I'll take qutebrowser any day. Best damn thing I've learned to use since (n)vim.
bogwog 2y ago
I hope a sustainable Firefox fork emerges soon because it seems Google's illegal default search deals (aka the only thing keeping Mozilla afloat) are coming to an end. That's a great thing in general, but it would really suck if FF died and we all got stuck with Chrome derivatives. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for my web browser if it's good. I wouldn't pay for Mozilla's FF, but I would pay for a fork of it by a company whose business model doesn't involve ads or selling data. I happily pay for Kagi, and will happily pay for the app that I use the most.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  Mozilla could keep building FF without Google, but it would require that 90% of the C suite get laid off and dedicated focus from the company...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    Good. They've lost market share continuously for fifteen years. In 2009 they had a 30% market share. Now they have a 5-6% market share. 4/5ths of their market share, gone.
    - choilive 2y ago
      The number of internet users have also gone up 300% over that time period, so on absolute terms they still have a sizeable user base.. but yes. They need to figure out how to increase market share.
      - fabrice_d 2y ago
        They are even losing users in absolute terms: check https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
    - observationist 2y ago
forthwall 2y ago
I'm really enjoying the experience of Zen. I appreciate a ~modernish~ style and UX paradigm on a browser that isn't chrome based. Keep it up!
explosion-s 2y ago
I've recently made a similar (more modular) project which compiles various features and patches them into a Firefox profile. It can compile themes, hardening, userscripts, userstyles and more into a clean firefox profile, basically removing the bloat from firefox while still being fully customizable: https://github.com/explosion-scratch/firebuilder https://github.com/explosion-scratch/firebuilder
- btown 2y ago
  Really cool! Do you know if there's anything similar for Chrome?
  - explosion-s 2y ago
    I don't think so, it's a lot harder to patch chrome because you'd need to recompile it. There is ungoogled-chromium but it doesn't add many features, mainly takes away the bloat. Unfortunately drm content is a bit finicky in ungoogled chromium. Firefox is great for modding because everything is contained in one profile folder, so one can simply make a new profile folder however they want and have the perfect browser
- mnmalst 2y ago
  This looks really great. One thing I have never seen done is having the url bar completely removed and put everything in the sidebar. That would really save some vertical space. Since you seem to know your way around the firefox sources, do you think that's possible?
  - explosion-s 2y ago
    Im not sure - most of what my project does is compile multiple people's modifications together, I feel like I saw one such repo recently, I'll reply if I find it
    - mnmalst 2y ago
      Would appreciate it, haven't seen something like this yet.
wpwpwpw 2y ago
Thank you for your work! I believe it's not ready for daily driving, but I was happy to try it out and, maybe, to check again later so it replaces firefox. Loved all the new features and look and feel. However, there are some quirks I'll describe here, maybe they'll be useful. The sidebar is missing some hover popups so one can know what the buttons mean; animations, in general, are not very good, making the interface look rough; some parts of the regular firefox interface are just "glued in", and they feel a bit alien / missing integration (bookmarks, history...); tab bar at right side not working, although there is a button for it (useful for wide monitors in which you pin the window to the right side). Keep going!
jdeaton 2y ago
The macos disk images are "broken" according to my os.
NayamAmarshe 2y ago
The website design is really cool! I love it!
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I hate it; it looks like a Tiktok adshort and I gathered no useful information despite significant movement through the voluminous scroll bar.
- krunck 2y ago
  Design is meaningless when there is zero content. The site has no information to help me in making a decision of whether I should try it out. No technical information at all.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cropcirclbureau 2y ago
I'll say it again, the golden standard for workspaces and sidebars is Sideberry and it's written for Firefox. Always glad to see new browser chrome efforts building on Firefox but it's such a high bar. Will still give this a try though.
rchaud 2y ago
Very cool project, happy to see a browser that's not a Chromium fork for once. Some feedback: - Web Panels: have an option for letting CTRL + Click (or other shortcut) open the link in the Web Panel sidebar. Drag and dropping the link into the sidebar would be a good shortcut as well. This works for use cases like browsing a search results page, and opening multiple links without losing focus on the search results page itself. - Horizontal Nav Bar: Vivaldi and Arc browser both have no horizontal bar taking up real estate. Maybe this is not possible to replicate with an FF fork, but having sidebar navigation AND a mostly full size top nav bar is redundant.
pshirshov 2y ago
Really cool but so far noone was able to package it for NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/327982 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/327982
- MarceColl 2y ago
  I wrote a flake based on the binary release while it gets packaged in case you are interested: https://github.com/MarceColl/zen-browser-flake https://github.com/MarceColl/zen-browser-flake
tamimio 2y ago
I will give it a try. Firefox has recently not been the best, especially in private browsing mode. Opening less than 15 tabs there, and it’s already using 25 GiB of RAM!
cynical_slave 2y ago
I want the newest open tab to be at the top of the list, not at the bottom. The top is where your mouse usually is, that's where the website controls are, that's where stuff happens. Having to move the mouse to the bottom to activate recent tabs is annoying, especially on huge monitors. It baffles me that none of the browsers or extensions that implement sidebar tabs have this option.
- TuxMark5 2y ago
  Sideberry for Firefox has settings that allow changing how new tabs behave. One of the settings allows placing new tabs on top of the list.
  - cynical_slave 2y ago
    It seems Sideberry only allows opening new tabs at the beginning of the list. That is not the same as just sorting newest at the top, since it also switches the order of native tabs as well. I want native tabs (since we can't hide them) to remain left to right. And I can't even move the "New Tab" button to the top.
    - 4k93n2 2y ago
      changing "place new tab (general rule)" to "panel start" in sidebery will put the new tab right at the top. unless you mean you want it only at the top of the group? zen also has a "compact mode" than hides the native tabs, but it hides other things you might want as well
sweeter 2y ago
You had me at tab groups. It is baffling that Firefox has refused to do anything sane about tab groups.
owjofwjeofm 2y ago
to me the main feature that makes arc browser appealing is how they combine the features of open tabs and bookmarks into one intuitive system, and making switching an open tab into a tab in the saved section really frictionless, and allowing you to view a tab in the same section in the same manner as an open tab. It also then automatically takes care of the memory management aspect of closing unused tabs for you while keeping the visual representation of open/saved tabs the same, and letting you be confident that the state of the saved tabs section is persisted. No browser that I've seen comparing itself to arc really does this. I downloaded zen and looked at it for like 30 seconds and it doesn't look like it does this either.
dev213 2y ago
(now ex-) Firefox user here. I think I am in love with this browser. I tried switching to arc, but it didn't stick since I really got used to the Firefox way of life. The arc browser also felt really commercial and has a lot of gimmicky AI features, which is not optimal. This Zen browser is like a blend of the best of both worlds!
mkbkn 2y ago
On Linux Mint 21.1 Mate, I was not able to launch or use the Appimage file. Then I installed the flatpak version and it worked. Though I prefer the former. Anyway, it looks good on the first try. Will give it a good try for a month or so before committing to it. Does it have "profiles" feature like Vivaldi?
eitland 2y ago
Does this thing have nested tabs (like TST or Sideberry) or is this another one that didn't realize that saving vertical space, while useful, is less than half the point of vertical tabs?
findthewords 2y ago
I have a suggestion: use the existing tabs sidepanel to display "bookmarks" and "history" in it, for a consistent experience, instead of two different kinds of pop up panels.
gxonatano 2y ago
The problems these browsers are trying to solve aren't web browser problems, they're window manager problems. Your web browser shouldn't try to be a window manager. - If you want to have two web pages side-by-side, you don't need a web browser that can handle split panes. Just have each web page in its own window and use your window manager to put them side-by-side. Tiling window managers will do this automatically. - If you want to have several web pages open but not visible, so that you can switch between them (i.e., tabs), just use your window manager's tabs, stacks, or workspaces. - If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs. - If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces. You can even name workspaces according to projects or tasks, and assign windows to them automatically. Any modern window manager will do, but ones with automatic tiling are the best. Sway, i3, Monad, Hyprland, Awesome, and Newm are a few.
- vilunov 2y ago
  You're basically saying web browsers and other applications (including IDEs, chat apps, etc) should remove support for tabs and rely on WMs providing tab functionality. Some of tiling managers you mentioned that I'm familiar with don't have any functionality I would be happy replacing browser tabs with. > If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs. Bookmarks and history have very different UX from tabs, they are clunky to use and I would never prefer them to opening 100 tabs, sorry. > If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces These workspaces don't enable separation of cookies and other state, they have a very different use case to browser workspaces.
- solarkraft 2y ago
  > just use your window manager's tabs, stacks, or workspaces. I wish we were in a world in which this is realistic. I can’t think of any major environment in which this is practical (maybe KDE has some plugin …). Microsoft once experimented with what I consider to be the right approach (https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65cfl8/microsoft_is_experimenting_with_tabs_in_file/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65cfl8/microsoft...), but it didn’t get far.
- 2y ago
gukkey 2y ago
I have been looking for an alternative for Arc for some time and this seems promising. Doesn't have folders and peek for now, but excited to see how it's going to evolve. Atleast this project isn't just firefox slapped with a wannabe arc theme.
deagle50 2y ago
I've wanted a split view in Firefox forever. Thank you!
niks1 2y ago
I have a few questions I would be very interested to hear the answers 1 When is the earliest we can try tab grouping in Firefox Nightly? 2 Will the following things be available, the ability to group by dragging and dropping a tab, the ability to name and change the name, assign a color, and pin and hide a tab group, and the option to sleep tabs in groups? 3 Is the Workspaces feature being considered, it is quite popular and has been implemented in Floorp and Zen? 4 Is tab grouping also considered for the Android version of Firefox? 5 Are there any plans for a Portable version with a built-in dark theme for websites? Thank you very much! We are very sad that many features have been removed, tab grouping, pwa, rss, compact mode, menu icons, etc., hopefully this will all be coming to Firefox and such mistakes will not be made again.
yellowapple 2y ago
Looks nice. I like that it defaults to vertical tabs, but I don't like the inability to give them any sort of hierarchy, be it a full-blown tree like Tree Style Tabs or with tab groups like Edge. Since it's just a Firefox reskin, I was able to login with my Mozilla account and sync my extensions, Tree Style Tabs included. Enabling Zen's "compact mode" turns it into a pretty ideal setup for TST, since the default tab list disappears entirely. Still would be nice to not need TST in the first place. Workspaces seem like a nice idea in theory, though currently underbaked in practice. Deleting a workspace appears to be bugged at the moment; attempting to do so just switches to the workspace instead of deleting it. It'd be great if they could integrate with Containers; I'd love to be able to e.g. set a default container for a given workspace (and then all tabs in that workspace would default to that particular container). The Zen Sidebar is pretty cool; I can see myself using the premade Wikipedia and Google Translate panels quite a bit, in addition to setting up some of my own. Resizing the Sidebar is pretty finicky, unfortunately; dragging the edge will often fail and cause the Sidebar's size to snap to a tiny width. Zen seems to have a built-in profile switcher, which is interesting, but seems redundant with Containers and way more limited. I also don't know why it defaulted to creating both "Default (alpha)" and "Default Profile" profiles, nor do I know why it set "Default (alpha)" as the default. I assume because this is an alpha release? I don't know if Zen changes enough for me to prefer using it over normal Firefox (especially with Firefox's own vertical tab and sidebar improvements on the horizon), but I appreciate that this exists and look forward to seeing where it goes.
vfclists 2y ago
Is it based on the GeckoView engine for Android which is never going to be ported to Windows?
keen99 2y ago
ah a cute but soon-to-be-dead project, since they apparently are intentionally breaking the macos experience. either support your users or remove support for your users - shipping them an intentionally broken experience is a bad move.
anjel 2y ago
Was really looking forward to trying this browser out. But the windows installer fails VirusTotal scan by 4 separate scanners. Its usually a false positive, but its not the environment to giving the benefit of the doubt for. This happens more and more often for me, and I'm surprised software development skips the stage of addressing this prior to app launch and promotion.
lovestaco 2y ago
Good software. One more smart thing to do would be to open different workspace by middle click on the workspace name or giving options to open from the list.
desipenguin 2y ago
Does Zen have (or plan to build) Auto Archive feature like Arc ? https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19228855311127-Auto-Archive-Clean-as-you-go https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19228855311127-A... I couldn't find any Firefox extension that does this (Or maybe I didn't look hard enough) This is the one feature that brought me to Arc (I've since stopped using Arc, and moved to Vivaldi. My "main" browser is still Firefox)
niks1 2y ago
I have a few questions I would be very interested to hear the answers 1 When is the earliest we can try tab grouping in Firefox Nightly? 2 Will the following things be available, the ability to group by dragging and dropping a tab, the ability to name and change the name, assign a color, and pin and hide a tab group, and the option to sleep tabs in groups? 3 Is the Workspaces feature being considered, it is quite popular and has been implemented in Floorp and Zen? 4 Is tab grouping also considered for the Android version of Firefox? 5 Are there any plans for a Portable version with a built-in dark theme for websites? Thank you very much! We are very sad that many features have been removed, tab grouping, pwa, rss, compact mode, menu icons, etc., hopefully this will all be coming to Firefox and such mistakes will not be made again.
Saris 2y ago
I'm getting a 403 forbidden error from Vercel while using Firefox to try and look at a Firefox fork lol.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
antran22 2y ago
I checked this out and I gotta say it is still in a very early stage. The features they are presenting seem nice, but not very usable, with a lot of rough edges. Then I found this issue, where essentially they left a huge backdoor open with Remote Debugger: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927. The guy claims that it was due to ignorance, but seeing this really shakes up my paranoia. Luckily I haven't typed any credential into the app. From a security-minded user's perspective, this is not a good sign. I hope that they would really put privacy & security forward, get some 3rd party security audits.
groove9373 2y ago
I noticed that the Firefox Multi-Account Containers addon isn't working for me on Zen browser. I'm using it via Flatpak. Does anyone else have this issue?

828 points by femou 2y ago

imagetic 2y ago

My download was corrupt and macOS threw it in the trash. That's a first.

wlonkly 2y ago
Same here -- I tried the x86 build as well with the same result.

gsimons88 2y ago

Does anybody have insight into how this compares to Brave? In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd.

Kokouane 2y ago
They only compared to Firefox-based browsers which does make sense. Most people are already firmly on one side of the Chromium vs FF engine debate. Compared to Brave in what terms? Speed, not sure, but Chromium is known to be better. As far as I know, Brave doesn't allow split tabs or workspaces though.
- NayamAmarshe 2y ago
  Brave now has split tabs in the latest nightly iirc. Not sure about workspaces, is it like profiles?
  - Perz1val 2y ago
    Seems like workspaces are just a different UI for tab grouping, some ppl may prefer it. For me both are usable, but both are just a partial remedy for people that keep too much tabs opened
mrweasel 2y ago
> In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd If their target audience is disgruntled Firefox users that makes a ton of sense. I would not consider replacing Firefox with a browser based on Chrome/Chromium. It's not that I think it a bad rendering engine, it not, but I don't like the mono-culture that has been promoted and would like to avoid contributing to it, if I can.
- netbioserror 2y ago
  I still don't understand this "browser engine monopoly" argument. Engines are the most difficult part to build and coordinate around. WebKit is open source and gets contributions from across the industry. It would make sense for most people to coalesce around that single target. The browsers built around the engine are the feature-filled interfaces people care about and where competition should happen. The engine has no opinions about tracking or tabs or built-in services. As soon as we argue we need unique engines, there are now multiple competing standards for developers to target. In fact, I'd bet that future engines that cite issues with WebKit as their motivation for a fork or a from-scratch rewrite will start using the tagline "WebKit-compatible" because that standard is so important.
  - DHPersonal 2y ago
    The issue with a single browser having dominance is that the largest contributor to that project doesn’t just control the project, they control the Web.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    > It would make sense for most people to coalesce around that single target No it wouldn't. Even the OpenSSH project has states that they'd prefer that more SSH implementation where around, due to security concerns. Bugs in OpenSSL where/are a serious issue, because of it was almost a monopoly until HeartBleed. Having a single rendering engine be 95% of the market is not a good option in terms of overall security for the internet. The rendering engine in Chrome is Blink, which is a fork of WebKit. Safari, GNOME Web and DuckDuckGos macOS browser still uses WebKit. Blink and WebKit is going to share some of the same issues, as they come from the same codebase, but they are two separate rendering engines at this point.

bionsystem 2y ago

All of those are features I love in Vivaldi. If it matures it will be a very welcome open source replacement.

PikachuEXE 2y ago
I use Vivaldi too. Will try this one out to see how it compared to Firefox
aezart 2y ago
I've been looking for a Vivaldi replacement as well, due to the looming manifest v3 stuff. Hopefully this, or another project like it, works out.
- adhamsalama 2y ago
  Try Firefox with the Sideberry extension.

a2128 2y ago

It's sad they don't link it clearly but it's available on Flathub if you're on Linux: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.zen_browser.zen https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.zen_browser.zen

redkoala 2y ago

Vertical tabs and privacy focused implementation gives me a good combination between the Arc browsing experience and the privacy protections that Mullvad browser (or private mode Firefox) deliver.

danpalmer 2y ago
Yeah I'm keen to try Zen to see if they've nailed the tab/workspace UX in the way that Arc has. I don't like Arc's decline into slow AI features and growth hacks, but some of the core functionality is really nice.
willi59549879 2y ago
I was very surprised with selection if the search engine after install. None of the browsers I tried do that. I quite like the vertical tabs also the browser is visually appealing

commercialnix 2y ago

I use Sway (an i3 clone for Wayland), so these "split views" and "workspaces" are not appealing to me. Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do not forwardly present writings on how they do these things, leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and there but not much more.

zamadatix 2y ago
I'm a Sway user as well but I still find value in features like workspaces, tabs, and split views in certain apps even though they are all also features in Sway. Sometimes a particular split (or any of those other things) can itself be a context I want to switch to in part of my current view. Rather than individually orchestrate that from wherever the components are into my current view it can be nice to define that relation more directly via something like this. Not saying such features in apps must also be appealing to you as well or anything equally silly, just whether or not they are appealing is more hinged on that base question of whether you like the idea of nested organizational structures than whether or not your window manager has a similar tiling feature.
- commercialnix 2y ago
  [flagged]
gorgoiler 2y ago
I’ve been using the sway family of window managers for nearly 20 years! (First ion2, then ion3, then i3, and now sway.) In all this time I’ve briefly used native tabs but mostly now use windows without title bars or any other decorations in split mode all of the time. Most of the day I simply have a terminal running tmux on the first workspace with vim in the first tmux window, shells in the others, and a browser on the second sway workspace. Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if they all deferred to sway. I’m just not sure how to do that well with easy switching between windows and I don’t know if vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?

sirodoht 2y ago

macOS says "“Zen Browser.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Bin." :(

weikju 2y ago
Probably isn't notarized. Right-click the app and open, or use the terminal: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app edit: turns out they are describing this process here from a link on the macos download page: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
- danpalmer 2y ago
  The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately, perhaps it needs a better title. Also while I understand some people have moral objections to the 100 dollar/euro registration fee, clearly a lot more than that has been spent in time to get the application to this stage, almost all apps for macOS distributing like this are notarized now, and with such a slick marketing page it just feels weird to then not spend a relatively small amount of money to make this immediately far more accessible. The instructions aren't hard to follow, but still make trying it out 10-100x harder. Also it's tricky to get donations for something that literally prevents people using the application, no one is going to donate for the registration fee before even trying it, and once they've gotten through the installation process there's no incentive to donate for that anymore.
  - weikju 2y ago
    > The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately, perhaps it needs a better title. yes I found that awkward as well
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    To be fair, requiring the developer 100/eur per year in perpetuity to avoid a dialog literally telling the user to drag the app into the Trash feels a lot like extortion.

0x2a 2y ago

Looks like it supports Firefox extensions such as uBlock Origin as well. Surprised the website didn't mention it. Wonder if this still applies: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

rocketvole 2y ago
I mean, it's a firefox-based browser. Is there any reason why it wouldn't support firefox extensions?
- 0x2a 2y ago
  I thought it might be similar to Orion based on the submission title, but it looks like a rebranded Firefox (which is great). This is what Mozilla should be doing.

hysan 2y ago

Seems… quite lacking in details? It makes some pretty bold claims but doesn’t explain how it achieves things like better performance. Their docs are also pretty empty.

dao- 2y ago
Here are Firefox about:config preferences they tweak for performance: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd443105b4606a4dc9e5733a9ad5/src/browser/app/profile/better-fox.js#L13-L59 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44... I also found this somewhat funny: # Edit: ok, ill remove it, goodbye top #1 on fastest browsers benchmark :[ # ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd443105b4606a4dc9e5733a9ad5/configs/common/mozconfig#L102 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
dnpls 2y ago
The website is so bare, I'd like to see a list with all the major features and some screenshots before downloading anything.

bityard 2y ago

Seems like the features they promote on the marketing page are ones that Vivaldi has had for quite some time. I'll probably give it a try but when I gave up on Firefox, one of the main reasons was that many of the sites I visit aren't tested on Firefox due to the low market share and are broken in subtle ways.

getcrunk 2y ago
Like what? Aside from google and Apple being actively hostile to Firefox I rarely have issues
- Yeri 2y ago
  100% and if I have issues it's an extension (like ublock or privacy badger)
  - dimator 2y ago
    These two are the culprits every time a page has issues on Firefox for me.

bpbp-mango 2y ago

Split tab is cool. Couldn't import data from firefox. Quite slow to launch. Profiles are buggy, the name gets lost and it keeps launching the welcome wizard. looking forward to seeing this mature

riperoni 2y ago

Firefox with some extras might he nice, but the structure of that web page raises the question: Who is the target audience? That website has so many oversimplified marketing claims that are about security and customization. It seems wholly undecided if the target audience is people who fall for buzz words or someone actually interested in quantitative improvements over Firefox. And yet the comparison is just checkboxes and not even including base Firefox. How about bar graphs for comparison and some actual pictures of the advertised customization, layout and workspaces? To me this still feels a little shady, even though the features seem nice.

jszymborski 2y ago

This website mentions LibreWolf which I've recently switched to. It's truly great. Takes care of all the decrapification I do to a fresh FF install while keeping up with the upstream security updates. Feels like how FF should feel imho.

dartharva 2y ago

I don't know why but websites always feel downgraded with Firefox and its descendants. Long load times, incomplete/failed loads, bad font rendering, buffering.. It feels evident that webmasters only care for compatibility with Chrome et al. It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.

winter_blue 2y ago
I use Firefox a lot (and occasionally Chrome), and I haven't had any issues with Firefox. I've been pretty happy with it.
frosting1337 2y ago
While I agree that develops really only care for Chromium compatability, I've not really noticed any issues with Firefox, except with Google sites every now and then (YouTube in particular).
- dartharva 2y ago
  Yes, Youtube is the main irritant for me as well.
  - mariusor 2y ago
    When it comes to the websites belonging to the competition, I feel like it's unjust to blame Firefox instead of, in this case, Google.
    - dartharva 2y ago
      Google is ironically a key sponsor of Firefox.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  Weirdly, I've had to install the full Google Chrome because the Chromium has been problematic. Can't remember details, but I think MS Teams was one example.

willi59549879 2y ago

I quite like the zen browser. It is privacy focused but also visually appealing. The feature that I like best, is that the browser does not take up a lot of space for itself. Even the top bar can be hidden. That way most of the screen is there to show the website.

wmstack 2y ago
This is the information I was looking for. Does it have the Arc style search box/dialog/palette that pops up when you need it?
- willi59549879 2y ago
  there is no search button. but you can search in the url bar, which will show you a button to switch to the corresponding tab

nxtcoder17 2y ago

how is it different than [floorp](https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en) ?

stackghost 2y ago
I suppose it doesn't have a name I'd be embarrassed to tell my grandmother about.
latexr 2y ago
Every time I see a question like this on HN, the answer can be found out with minimal effort. If you want to recommend some relevant alternative you use, just be honest and say that. If you really want to know, it would be reasonable to spend twenty seconds on the page, there’s a comparison table.
nusl 2y ago
You can determine this yourself quite quickly by visiting each site and comparing them.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsm9lu/im_doing_a_new_firefox_based_browser_im_focusing/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsm9lu/im_doing_a... Reddit launch of the project about 4 months ago. Fantastic project and already very polished browser. Really enjoying it!

Mashimo 2y ago

> Optimized for peak performance What does that even mean?

Alifatisk 2y ago
I interpret that as they have tweaked the configurations with the performance in mind, meaning their goal when customizing the browser has been to get as much juice as possible out of the browser.
- MrAlex94 2y ago
  Realistically, compiler flags and config flags have had diminishing returns on Firefox builds for a few years now. Mozilla are very quick to update the toolchain now, compared to before as well as taking care of curated CPU-dispatch where necessary.

Hard_Space 2y ago

Does anyone know if Zen identifies itself as 'Firefox' at program-level when running on Windows? This is the biggest mistake that FF forks and offshoots make, since it makes it impossible to run Firefox and the derivative work at the same time.

jeremiahlee 2y ago
Just tested with Zen v1.0.0-a.26. User agent reports: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0 Exact match with Firefox v129.0.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
- ReadCarlBarks 2y ago
  He's not asking about the User-Agent string sent to websites. He's asking about how the browser identifies itself to the Windows operating system. According to him, other forks say simply "Firefox," which makes it impossible to run them alongside the official Firefox release.
autoexec 2y ago
Shouldn't be a problem if you use the portable version of one (or even both if that's an option).

widdershins 2y ago

Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I will write one. I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up! My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.

dao- 2y ago
Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this. I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable. For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient. Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
- Croftengea 2y ago
  Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?
  - dao- 2y ago
    We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.

benreesman 2y ago

We don’t need those investors: https://youtu.be/kKAue9DiHc0 https://youtu.be/kKAue9DiHc0

maelito 2y ago

Firefox's container addon is one of the features that make me love firefox. But they could be integrated better. I'll try Zen.

ammar-DLL 2y ago

i wish if this made in gtk4 or qt6

raghavbali 2y ago

the browser wars are heating up again! nice

whywhywhywhy 2y ago
The browser window chrome[1] wars* 1:(As in the pre Chrome meaning of the word)

ramon156 2y ago

While I don't condone complaining for the sake of complaining, I really don't see why I would use this. Every argument feels very "floatey". When I think of browser devs, I don't think about fancy UI, and blazingly fast speeds! I think about engineers who know what they're talking about. I've never heard of floorp, and the arguments against librewolf are silly. On top of that, some of these "features" like themes, profile switching are already in FireFox. So again, why would I choose Zen? I don't see how this project adds any value to the very mature FF, it's just piggybacking imo.

dotancohen 2y ago
Sometimes (not necessarily here) just a better UI for existing features is enough to make a project succeed.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  One relevant example being Firefox, which started in exactly that way. Hiding some features from the overly-featureful Mozilla and focusing on the basic user flow.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Perz1val 2y ago
The whole thing looks like the "new month, new JS framework" situation

tcsenpai 2y ago

I used Arc a lot back when I used MacOS. Was definitely a pleasing experience. I missed it a lot since I switched to Linux/Firefox. I just set up Zen with all my extensions and bookmarks, it behaves very well: let's see if it stands the trial of time, but very nice work. I like the UI

adhamsalama 2y ago
Have you tried the Sideberry extension?
- tcsenpai 2y ago
  Nope. I see it is a vertical tab extension: will try it!

grumblepeet 2y ago

Sadly didnt run for me on Windows on this Arm laptop although in mitigation I didnt try that hard & was in a hurry. I might have another look at it later. Uninstalled for now.

mrweasel 2y ago

Someone pointed out to me that you can set eBay as the default search engine. That seems like a weird option. There can't be many that primarily uses their browser to access eBay, though I wouldn't rule out that people with this preference exists.

biugbkifcjk 2y ago
Maybe they get some royalties by having it as an option?
nyanpasu64 2y ago
Stock Firefox also allows setting Amazon and eBay as a default search engine, and I wonder if this is related to Amazon being a sponsored shortcut on the new tab page.
autoexec 2y ago
I wish you could just set the default search engine to "none". I just disable it eventually anyway, but it still leaves a bunch of garbage behind, like having "Search <whatever> for <blah blah blah>" in the context menu.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

I got a weird error when trying to run the app from within the .DMG on ARM Mac, in case anyone who can look into it is reading. It said "Zen Browser" is damaged and can't be opened, you should reject the disk image. edit: it's a known thing to do with Apples security, workarounds in step 3 here: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53

SigmundurM 2y ago
Per their documentation [1], you have to bypass MacOS's gatekeeper. [1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-macos#step-3-bypass-gatekeeper https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-macos#step-3-byp...
ulimn 2y ago
I hate this about MacOS. It happens seldom enough for me to forget about it and every time I have to search the web for the solution. Thanks for posting the steps.
causal 2y ago
Reading the discussion, I see the developers intend to never sign their OSX package. This is a pretty big red flag for me, shows that the developer isn't really serious about supporting OSX. Too bad, I was excited by the idea, but this is just unprofessional and I really need to trust my browser.
- mariusor 2y ago
  > this is just unprofessional Or they just prefer to not go out of their way to support the walled garden that is the Apple ecosystem. Principles beat professionalism any day for me.
  - causal 2y ago
    Then don't claim to support it

anon23432343 2y ago

One thing almost all arc clones dont get right and I talked with other arc users about this is that arc when surfing has no ui besides the border no top bar not tabs you can hide everything if you want to. I downloaded Zen and what do i see a top bar which I can not hide or at least I can not find how to do it.

anon23432343 2y ago
Okay I found it but its wanky at best. how do i show the topbar once its gone? I get that this ia an alpha but yeah going back to arc feels much smoother
joshjob42 2y ago
Activate Compact Mode in the settings.

Alifatisk 2y ago

First we got Floorp, now we got Zen. Love it! I hope they make it available through Chocolatey and Homebrew like Floorp. I really like that Zen offers two options, a setup wizard and a portable binary.

replete 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

braggerxyz 2y ago

Hmm, doesn't appeal to me. There is nothing over stock FF which I would consider important for me.

thinker5555 2y ago

I've seen the "workspaces" thing in a few different browsers now. I know Vivaldi and Arc have them, and it sounds like it's a separate thing from profiles, but I don't quite grok what the difference is between workspaces and profiles. Can anyone help enlighten me? If you use both workspaces and profiles, what do you do differently between them?

_benj 2y ago
I use workspaces in Vivaldi and they are pretty much a set of tabs that I can switch as a set, but all under the same profile. As an example, in my dev workspace I have GitHub, localhost, and a few other things I might need. In another workspace in have Google calendar, Jira, gmail, etc… I can switch workspaces and it will switch all of the current tabs in my browser. But, I’m logged in, say, in the same GitHub or Google account across workspace. Profiles on the other hand (I’ve used those on Arc) change where you are logged in… so I can be logged in to my work gmail on one profile, and to my personal gmail on another. Personally I don’t find profiles that useful just for the fact that I simply use different browsers for personal and work… but a use case for profiles is, for example, to be signed in as admin and user to your local dev web application and test things between the two just by changing tabs instead of having to logout and login
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
protomolecule 2y ago
One might think of them as virtual desktops.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Could I think of profiles as virtual desktops too?
  - lysp 2y ago
    Different user logins

layer8 2y ago

Whenever I read “beautiful” in marketing copy, I’m immediately put off. It’s so presumptuous and conveys vanity. Moreover, users may prefer their software to be utilitarian, and in any case are likely to have different opinions on what constitutes “beauty”. For that aspect: Show, don’t tell. If people do find it beautiful, then they don’t need to be told. And if they don’t, then telling them is unlikely to change that.

hoistbypetard 2y ago
I don't find it off-putting. I may or may not agree that the software is beautiful because, as you point out, people often have different opinions on what constitutes beauty. All the same, I find it useful to know that the authors of the software consider "beauty" one of their goals. And beauty does not preclude utility.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I read it the opposite way: - I feel more passion from the author. - I value the pride they show in their work. - I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful software will actually report it's less buggy. The problem is when someone makes appearances more important than being useful. But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt. We need more browser diversity.
- gexla 2y ago
  How do you know it was one of the developers who wrote this? Maybe they hired someone to create the site and the content. Granted, the site is in the repo and you can see who committed the assets. But that still doesn't tell you who originally wrote it.
  - billsmithaustin 2y ago
    You're suggesting one of the developers went through all the trouble to create a browser, then allowed someone to add assets to the repo without the developer reviewing them first?

anotheryou 2y ago

Any difference besides the UI to using sideberry with containers? E.g. seperated history suggestions or something?

ikari_pl 2y ago
definitely not any of the differences that make Arc attractive (new windows aren't portals to the same tabs, cmd+t doesn't open a tab/command bar, search doesn't turn into AI search...)

account42 2y ago

What is it with modern software and ungoogleable names. Make up something unique instead of just using short english words FFS.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

I've been wanting split view in FF for a long time, so I'm going to try this right now And I know somebody, somewhere, is going to argue that it should be the job of the desktop. I disagree. I don't want to have to create each context I want things to exist in, and manipulate that carefully. I like automatic context. That's why I like tabs in my browser and not a thousand windows. And that's why I enjoy my split views to be inside the tabs I just created.

bloopernova 2y ago
I use vertical tabs, so I don't want 2 windows with tabs, I want 1 window with tabs-1stview-2ndview
discardedrefuse 2y ago
Mozilla maintains a Firefox extension that does split view in the browser. Its called Side View. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/
- butz 2y ago
  "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing." What?
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    I’m sure that you can piece together how this could happen.
  - slenk 2y ago
    A lot of legitimate Firefox Addons say that. Just means Moz can't manually review every single extension if they want to allow their users a good extension experience...unlike developing Chrome extensions
    - tredre3 2y ago

qurashee 2y ago

"The only limit is your imagination" is a direct reference to zombo.com for me

giancarlostoro 2y ago

I have been using Firefox since after 2004 (I'm not sure if it was 2005 or 2006) and while I love the browser, I wish they would invest moreso in just making it less cluttered. One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is get rid of the stupid gaps next to the URL bar. Every. single. time. It really angers me. Who wanted that? Do people leave it on because they can't figure out how to remove them? We had a browser aiming towards being a full on Rust application, and I was excited and cheering that on, not because it was Rust, but because the focus by shifting to Rust was security and speed. Now I'm not sure the focus. I like how sleek this browser looks, and the "themes" seem to target very specific needs of minimalizing the UI which I also appreciate. I'll have to pull this one down for my Linux box to try it out.

someone4958923 2y ago
> One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is get rid of the stupid gaps next to the URL bar. Every. single. time. I THIS! This is the first thing I do after installing firefox. Nice to see I'm not the only one :)
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  I can't go 1 minute with that thing turned on, it drives me crazy.

gpm 2y ago

femou are you the author? https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/tree/main/src/browser/base/content https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/tree/main/src/browser... has a submodule pointing to https://github.com/zen-browser/components/tree/dab7fd0b2fbf2a3871d09306365e60fe5c0c17a1 https://github.com/zen-browser/components/tree/dab7fd0b2fbf2... which isn't public... I assume that's an oversight.

Izmaki 2y ago
Woops.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

brianzelip 2y ago

Finally something not chromium!

eddyg 2y ago

The most game-changing thing for me about Arc has been Air Traffic Control. I have spaces set up my various web-based apps, and previously they would be scattered among my dozens of browser windows. Now, the tabs of each web app are beautifully contained in their own spaces, thanks to ATC. Any idea if Zen supports this? And ctrl-tab for quickly cycling between recent tabs (even across Spaces)?

mazugrin2 2y ago

femou, are you affiliated with Zen? Do you know if there are any plans to add support for ARM users running Windows or Linux?

jeremiahlee 2y ago

Website getting hugged to death for a second day. Direct link to downloads from the GitHub releases: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/releases https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/releases

causality0 2y ago

Someone want to explain what "based on the Firefox engine" means? Is it a fork of Firefox or do they think I'm too stupid to know what Gecko is?

Kokouane 2y ago
Not a fork, it is just based on Gecko from what I can tell on their GitHub. To be fair, Zen is clearly targeting a regular audience who most likely do not know what Gecko is.

remedan 2y ago

I really like the UI! I use Firefox with Sidebery and the top tab bar hidden via userChrome.css, which is kind of a hassle. Zen supports that kind of layout out of the box. I'm very happy to see a new modern browser not based on Chromium. Will definitely test drive it to see if it's worth switching to.

hodanli 2y ago
i really like the hierarchy in sidebery

jedisct1 2y ago

Do people really care about the engine being used under the hood? From a user perspective, I see no difference between Blink, Webkit and Gecko. And when there is, it's a website that has only been tested on Blink, or uses features not available elsewhere.

rocketvole 2y ago
traditionally no, but adblocking on firefox has been traditionally better and chrome(and therefore chromium) is about to break many adblocks
tjoff 2y ago
Yes, I care deeply about diversity in the browser land. Luckily Gecko also performs the best for me.

shafyy 2y ago

Looks promising. How do you plan on being financially sustainable?

chown 2y ago

I've recently started using Arc mostly out of FOMO and there are parts that I like and parts I don't. I have been a Firefox user for a long time before that so glad to see something similar that's one of the major priorities is the aesthetics and I very much appreciate that. I tried to use it on my macOS Apple Silicone and got an error about it being broken and macOS suggested to trash it. Not sure if it is a bug issue. Will come back and try it again though to give it a second chance :)

sparky_ 2y ago
This super unhelpful error is sometimes the result of trying to run an unsigned or developer signed binary on Apple Silicon. Try `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine program.app`, then open it by right clicking on the app, and selecting 'Open' while holding option + command.
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Bypassing Gatekeeper (the binary signing process in macOS) does not seem like a good idea when downloading apps off random websites.
  - eitland 2y ago
    I always run everything through virustotal first. (I should probably add that this is step two in my process: step one is to be very cautious and not download most things in the first place.)
  - sparky_ 2y ago
    Given the audience on HN, I think we can presume any readers of my comment are not trying to execute completely random untrusted binaries. There are legitimate cases when you need to do this to run a binary you trust, but the system doesn't.
causal 2y ago
+1 on Apple Silicon build being damaged. A lot of users that care about aesthetic are going to be on MBPs and they're all blocked right now.

chrisabrams 2y ago

I tried downloading this for MacOS Silicon and was told the dmg was damaged :/ Guess I'll wait a little bit for things to iron out.

Alifatisk 2y ago
It's not damaged, read some other comments about the workaround for this.

upcoming-sesame 2y ago

Images on the landing page look very pixelated

lordofgibbons 2y ago

I'm very interested! Before I adopt, could you please share what's your business model?

lagniappe 2y ago

“Zen Browser.app” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should eject the disk image. Current MacOS on M2

ObscureMind 2y ago
cd /Applications && xattr -d com.apple.provenance "Zen Browser.app"/ && xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "Zen Browser.app"/
- lagniappe 2y ago
  I appreciate it, but I'll wait. When you enter a restaurant or hotel, and the lobby is disheveled, the parts you can't see likely won't be of a higher standard. Not for me yet.

ertucetin 2y ago

Why are there so many new browsers these days? Is there really that much demand for them? Considering that creating one is very hard and requires a team.

bee_rider 2y ago
The situation is pretty bad, where there are only two browsers: an ad-company controlled one that is making life harder for ad-blockers, and Firefox which is… fine, but somehow both stagnant and unfocused. So, the opening is there, can’t blame people for trying to fill it. OTOH this is just a Firefox fork advertised as a new browser.
- joshmarinacci 2y ago
  Don’t forget Safari. Essentially there are three browser engines that all browsers are built on. The only engine that is truly new in the last 15 years is Servo. (And maybe Ladybird)
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    lol, I posted the comment from mobile safari but didn’t think of it. Eh, closed source software doesn’t count, haha.

ebri 2y ago

I'll take qutebrowser any day. Best damn thing I've learned to use since (n)vim.

bogwog 2y ago

I hope a sustainable Firefox fork emerges soon because it seems Google's illegal default search deals (aka the only thing keeping Mozilla afloat) are coming to an end. That's a great thing in general, but it would really suck if FF died and we all got stuck with Chrome derivatives. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for my web browser if it's good. I wouldn't pay for Mozilla's FF, but I would pay for a fork of it by a company whose business model doesn't involve ads or selling data. I happily pay for Kagi, and will happily pay for the app that I use the most.

bearjaws 2y ago
Mozilla could keep building FF without Google, but it would require that 90% of the C suite get laid off and dedicated focus from the company...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Good. They've lost market share continuously for fifteen years. In 2009 they had a 30% market share. Now they have a 5-6% market share. 4/5ths of their market share, gone.
  - choilive 2y ago
    The number of internet users have also gone up 300% over that time period, so on absolute terms they still have a sizeable user base.. but yes. They need to figure out how to increase market share.
    - fabrice_d 2y ago
      They are even losing users in absolute terms: check https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
  - observationist 2y ago

forthwall 2y ago

I'm really enjoying the experience of Zen. I appreciate a ~modernish~ style and UX paradigm on a browser that isn't chrome based. Keep it up!

explosion-s 2y ago

I've recently made a similar (more modular) project which compiles various features and patches them into a Firefox profile. It can compile themes, hardening, userscripts, userstyles and more into a clean firefox profile, basically removing the bloat from firefox while still being fully customizable: https://github.com/explosion-scratch/firebuilder https://github.com/explosion-scratch/firebuilder

btown 2y ago
Really cool! Do you know if there's anything similar for Chrome?
- explosion-s 2y ago
  I don't think so, it's a lot harder to patch chrome because you'd need to recompile it. There is ungoogled-chromium but it doesn't add many features, mainly takes away the bloat. Unfortunately drm content is a bit finicky in ungoogled chromium. Firefox is great for modding because everything is contained in one profile folder, so one can simply make a new profile folder however they want and have the perfect browser
mnmalst 2y ago
This looks really great. One thing I have never seen done is having the url bar completely removed and put everything in the sidebar. That would really save some vertical space. Since you seem to know your way around the firefox sources, do you think that's possible?
- explosion-s 2y ago
  Im not sure - most of what my project does is compile multiple people's modifications together, I feel like I saw one such repo recently, I'll reply if I find it
  - mnmalst 2y ago
    Would appreciate it, haven't seen something like this yet.

wpwpwpw 2y ago

Thank you for your work! I believe it's not ready for daily driving, but I was happy to try it out and, maybe, to check again later so it replaces firefox. Loved all the new features and look and feel. However, there are some quirks I'll describe here, maybe they'll be useful. The sidebar is missing some hover popups so one can know what the buttons mean; animations, in general, are not very good, making the interface look rough; some parts of the regular firefox interface are just "glued in", and they feel a bit alien / missing integration (bookmarks, history...); tab bar at right side not working, although there is a button for it (useful for wide monitors in which you pin the window to the right side). Keep going!

jdeaton 2y ago

The macos disk images are "broken" according to my os.

NayamAmarshe 2y ago

The website design is really cool! I love it!

Dalewyn 2y ago
I hate it; it looks like a Tiktok adshort and I gathered no useful information despite significant movement through the voluminous scroll bar.
krunck 2y ago
Design is meaningless when there is zero content. The site has no information to help me in making a decision of whether I should try it out. No technical information at all.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cropcirclbureau 2y ago

I'll say it again, the golden standard for workspaces and sidebars is Sideberry and it's written for Firefox. Always glad to see new browser chrome efforts building on Firefox but it's such a high bar. Will still give this a try though.

rchaud 2y ago

Very cool project, happy to see a browser that's not a Chromium fork for once. Some feedback: - Web Panels: have an option for letting CTRL + Click (or other shortcut) open the link in the Web Panel sidebar. Drag and dropping the link into the sidebar would be a good shortcut as well. This works for use cases like browsing a search results page, and opening multiple links without losing focus on the search results page itself. - Horizontal Nav Bar: Vivaldi and Arc browser both have no horizontal bar taking up real estate. Maybe this is not possible to replicate with an FF fork, but having sidebar navigation AND a mostly full size top nav bar is redundant.

pshirshov 2y ago

Really cool but so far noone was able to package it for NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/327982 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/327982

MarceColl 2y ago
I wrote a flake based on the binary release while it gets packaged in case you are interested: https://github.com/MarceColl/zen-browser-flake https://github.com/MarceColl/zen-browser-flake

tamimio 2y ago

I will give it a try. Firefox has recently not been the best, especially in private browsing mode. Opening less than 15 tabs there, and it’s already using 25 GiB of RAM!

cynical_slave 2y ago

I want the newest open tab to be at the top of the list, not at the bottom. The top is where your mouse usually is, that's where the website controls are, that's where stuff happens. Having to move the mouse to the bottom to activate recent tabs is annoying, especially on huge monitors. It baffles me that none of the browsers or extensions that implement sidebar tabs have this option.

TuxMark5 2y ago
Sideberry for Firefox has settings that allow changing how new tabs behave. One of the settings allows placing new tabs on top of the list.
- cynical_slave 2y ago
  It seems Sideberry only allows opening new tabs at the beginning of the list. That is not the same as just sorting newest at the top, since it also switches the order of native tabs as well. I want native tabs (since we can't hide them) to remain left to right. And I can't even move the "New Tab" button to the top.
  - 4k93n2 2y ago
    changing "place new tab (general rule)" to "panel start" in sidebery will put the new tab right at the top. unless you mean you want it only at the top of the group? zen also has a "compact mode" than hides the native tabs, but it hides other things you might want as well

sweeter 2y ago

You had me at tab groups. It is baffling that Firefox has refused to do anything sane about tab groups.

owjofwjeofm 2y ago

to me the main feature that makes arc browser appealing is how they combine the features of open tabs and bookmarks into one intuitive system, and making switching an open tab into a tab in the saved section really frictionless, and allowing you to view a tab in the same section in the same manner as an open tab. It also then automatically takes care of the memory management aspect of closing unused tabs for you while keeping the visual representation of open/saved tabs the same, and letting you be confident that the state of the saved tabs section is persisted. No browser that I've seen comparing itself to arc really does this. I downloaded zen and looked at it for like 30 seconds and it doesn't look like it does this either.

dev213 2y ago

(now ex-) Firefox user here. I think I am in love with this browser. I tried switching to arc, but it didn't stick since I really got used to the Firefox way of life. The arc browser also felt really commercial and has a lot of gimmicky AI features, which is not optimal. This Zen browser is like a blend of the best of both worlds!

mkbkn 2y ago

On Linux Mint 21.1 Mate, I was not able to launch or use the Appimage file. Then I installed the flatpak version and it worked. Though I prefer the former. Anyway, it looks good on the first try. Will give it a good try for a month or so before committing to it. Does it have "profiles" feature like Vivaldi?

eitland 2y ago

Does this thing have nested tabs (like TST or Sideberry) or is this another one that didn't realize that saving vertical space, while useful, is less than half the point of vertical tabs?

findthewords 2y ago

I have a suggestion: use the existing tabs sidepanel to display "bookmarks" and "history" in it, for a consistent experience, instead of two different kinds of pop up panels.

gxonatano 2y ago

The problems these browsers are trying to solve aren't web browser problems, they're window manager problems. Your web browser shouldn't try to be a window manager. - If you want to have two web pages side-by-side, you don't need a web browser that can handle split panes. Just have each web page in its own window and use your window manager to put them side-by-side. Tiling window managers will do this automatically. - If you want to have several web pages open but not visible, so that you can switch between them (i.e., tabs), just use your window manager's tabs, stacks, or workspaces. - If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs. - If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces. You can even name workspaces according to projects or tasks, and assign windows to them automatically. Any modern window manager will do, but ones with automatic tiling are the best. Sway, i3, Monad, Hyprland, Awesome, and Newm are a few.

vilunov 2y ago
You're basically saying web browsers and other applications (including IDEs, chat apps, etc) should remove support for tabs and rely on WMs providing tab functionality. Some of tiling managers you mentioned that I'm familiar with don't have any functionality I would be happy replacing browser tabs with. > If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs. Bookmarks and history have very different UX from tabs, they are clunky to use and I would never prefer them to opening 100 tabs, sorry. > If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces These workspaces don't enable separation of cookies and other state, they have a very different use case to browser workspaces.
solarkraft 2y ago
> just use your window manager's tabs, stacks, or workspaces. I wish we were in a world in which this is realistic. I can’t think of any major environment in which this is practical (maybe KDE has some plugin …). Microsoft once experimented with what I consider to be the right approach (https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65cfl8/microsoft_is_experimenting_with_tabs_in_file/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65cfl8/microsoft...), but it didn’t get far.
2y ago

gukkey 2y ago

I have been looking for an alternative for Arc for some time and this seems promising. Doesn't have folders and peek for now, but excited to see how it's going to evolve. Atleast this project isn't just firefox slapped with a wannabe arc theme.

deagle50 2y ago

I've wanted a split view in Firefox forever. Thank you!

niks1 2y ago

I have a few questions I would be very interested to hear the answers 1 When is the earliest we can try tab grouping in Firefox Nightly? 2 Will the following things be available, the ability to group by dragging and dropping a tab, the ability to name and change the name, assign a color, and pin and hide a tab group, and the option to sleep tabs in groups? 3 Is the Workspaces feature being considered, it is quite popular and has been implemented in Floorp and Zen? 4 Is tab grouping also considered for the Android version of Firefox? 5 Are there any plans for a Portable version with a built-in dark theme for websites? Thank you very much! We are very sad that many features have been removed, tab grouping, pwa, rss, compact mode, menu icons, etc., hopefully this will all be coming to Firefox and such mistakes will not be made again.

yellowapple 2y ago

Looks nice. I like that it defaults to vertical tabs, but I don't like the inability to give them any sort of hierarchy, be it a full-blown tree like Tree Style Tabs or with tab groups like Edge. Since it's just a Firefox reskin, I was able to login with my Mozilla account and sync my extensions, Tree Style Tabs included. Enabling Zen's "compact mode" turns it into a pretty ideal setup for TST, since the default tab list disappears entirely. Still would be nice to not need TST in the first place. Workspaces seem like a nice idea in theory, though currently underbaked in practice. Deleting a workspace appears to be bugged at the moment; attempting to do so just switches to the workspace instead of deleting it. It'd be great if they could integrate with Containers; I'd love to be able to e.g. set a default container for a given workspace (and then all tabs in that workspace would default to that particular container). The Zen Sidebar is pretty cool; I can see myself using the premade Wikipedia and Google Translate panels quite a bit, in addition to setting up some of my own. Resizing the Sidebar is pretty finicky, unfortunately; dragging the edge will often fail and cause the Sidebar's size to snap to a tiny width. Zen seems to have a built-in profile switcher, which is interesting, but seems redundant with Containers and way more limited. I also don't know why it defaulted to creating both "Default (alpha)" and "Default Profile" profiles, nor do I know why it set "Default (alpha)" as the default. I assume because this is an alpha release? I don't know if Zen changes enough for me to prefer using it over normal Firefox (especially with Firefox's own vertical tab and sidebar improvements on the horizon), but I appreciate that this exists and look forward to seeing where it goes.

vfclists 2y ago

Is it based on the GeckoView engine for Android which is never going to be ported to Windows?

keen99 2y ago

ah a cute but soon-to-be-dead project, since they apparently are intentionally breaking the macos experience. either support your users or remove support for your users - shipping them an intentionally broken experience is a bad move.

anjel 2y ago

Was really looking forward to trying this browser out. But the windows installer fails VirusTotal scan by 4 separate scanners. Its usually a false positive, but its not the environment to giving the benefit of the doubt for. This happens more and more often for me, and I'm surprised software development skips the stage of addressing this prior to app launch and promotion.

lovestaco 2y ago

Good software. One more smart thing to do would be to open different workspace by middle click on the workspace name or giving options to open from the list.

desipenguin 2y ago

Does Zen have (or plan to build) Auto Archive feature like Arc ? https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19228855311127-Auto-Archive-Clean-as-you-go https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19228855311127-A... I couldn't find any Firefox extension that does this (Or maybe I didn't look hard enough) This is the one feature that brought me to Arc (I've since stopped using Arc, and moved to Vivaldi. My "main" browser is still Firefox)

niks1 2y ago

Saris 2y ago

I'm getting a 403 forbidden error from Vercel while using Firefox to try and look at a Firefox fork lol.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

antran22 2y ago

I checked this out and I gotta say it is still in a very early stage. The features they are presenting seem nice, but not very usable, with a lot of rough edges. Then I found this issue, where essentially they left a huge backdoor open with Remote Debugger: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927. The guy claims that it was due to ignorance, but seeing this really shakes up my paranoia. Luckily I haven't typed any credential into the app. From a security-minded user's perspective, this is not a good sign. I hope that they would really put privacy & security forward, get some 3rd party security audits.

groove9373 2y ago

I noticed that the Firefox Multi-Account Containers addon isn't working for me on Zen browser. I'm using it via Flatpak. Does anyone else have this issue?