I am currently trying to see if I can replace Firefox with Zen. Zen still has some Firefox telemetry but they are off by default, so I like it. I think difference under the hood is DRM. Maybe it is time to finally ditch Netflix.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Netflix and their low resolution can suck it. Sail the seas, matey
Aye aye captain, let me bring the barrels of rum for the voyage.
I will likely ditch Vivaldi for this one tab groups gets implemented. It has all the features I need and I've been looking for a non-chromium browser to switch to for a while. Floorp was close but missing critical features. Zen is very exciting for me.
New Firefox forks are quite interesting. I've tried it, these are my impressions so far:
- The UI looks a little bit too much like a generic electron app to me, there is no option for native GTK or QT theming.
- It seems they ship version that use the newer CPU instructions to optimize the application, I'm not sure standard Firefox does. This is neat. It does feel a bit faster but I'm unsure whether this is because of optimizations or because I have 100x as many tabs open on vanilla Firefox right now.
- The vertical tabs are very nice. I currently use the "Tree Style Tab" extension and some hacky CSS scripts for that, and this seems like it would work a lot better.
- The shortcuts are off by default, which is nice, but still seem to be the same as Firefox.
- It feels a bit buggy. I had to restart the application to be able to load a site.
- They kept Firefox sync, which I like.
- You can choose between dark and light mode on the first startup, but I haven't been able to find the setting again.
Conclusion Overall, a decent Firefox rebrand. Better tab management, split windows, and workspaces seem quite nice. I would probably consider using it if it put the settings in 1 place and didn't have any bugs.
So far I really like it, some minor gripes like the private browsing window being hard to distinguish and Pocket being missing (I'm one of the 5 persons that uses it), but for that first one there's already a GitHub issue opened.
Did you look in about:config ? Maybe the flag for Pocket is there but turned off.
I'm on mobile now otherwise I'd check
Good idea, I'll check.
Love to see it! I think with Google ranking the core privacy functionality of Chromium we will see more new browsers being forked from FF.
Feels nice, closing tabs is bit convoluted though.
you can click the second sidebar button to expand the tab view
Or middle-click the tab to close it.
Yeah, that too. How could I forget?
Do you feel like the scroll is jittery?
No
I've been using floorp but the vertical tabs is still quite clunky and it uses a lot of ram on linux compared to windows. So I'll try this right away and update my comment with a review.
Edit 3: It's simply the best option rn. Vertical tabs are perfect. Workspaces can now be tied to containers. It's pretty hyped, development is fast and getting a lot of love too so I would 100% recommended zen.
Edit 2: I updated my pc and now it's pretty smooth. Will change the update after giving it a bit more time.
Edit 1: ~~I used it and it needs time. Vertical tab is similar to floorp but it's too sensitive on "hover to expand". Webpages seem very laggy and clunky, I have auto scroll on and yet it feels very jittery. Takes less ram compared to floorp(~1gb) with 1tab. Themestore looks good. Overall looks quite modern. Final tldr, needs optimization and not ready for daily drive.~~
This got me to finally move away from Edge. Only thing I'm wishing comes soon is native PWA support. The addon is so janky and my biggest gripe about using Firefox, but I can put up with it since I've now got vertical tabs and multiple profiles
Really like this, except that it breaks the Adaptive Tab Bar Colour extension. I've been using FF with edgy-arc-fr userchrome and Sidebery which is nearly perfect in terms of UI but definitely feels slower than Zen. I'd definitely switch to this if it had some native adaptive UI colour, I just think it's neat.
Is the sidebar here just the same as the new native Firefox vertical sidebar, or is it bespoke?
Zen's vertical tab bar seems like they coded it themselves.
Hmmm this feels like Vivaldi built on Firefox. I like the tiling for tabs! Overall pretty good, would like to see the tab tiling separators smaller, but that's a small gripe. Looking forward to see where this goes!
I'm getting that with Gmail and 2 google sheets open (just as an example workload), my system says Zen uses 899 MB of memory, while Firefox uses 1261 MB. However, the way they split tasks into different processes (or at least the way my system monitor groups them) seems to be different, so I'm not sure how much of that difference is real.
Looking at the browsers task manager, they report about the same amount of memory by the browser itself, and for tab handling FF seems to grab more memory when opened, then decrease over time, whereas Zen seems to have a more consistent memory consumption. Sheets tabs use equivalent memory in both, and Gmail uses about 20% more memory in Zen. Both use an insignificant amount of CPU, of course.
Zen does feel more responsive, but it's not a dealbreaker. Good to know the customizations aren't causing catastrophic resource usage though.
Edit: My only other thing I find wierd is that its kinda hard to close tabs. You have to use the right-click menu -- even using the 'c' keyboard shortcut only selects it, and hitting it again moves to another option!
you can either expand the tabs or middle-click them. i do wonder what the ideal solution would be
Is this Chromium Firefox?
what
I read it has Edge features. Edge is built in Chromium.
and Firefox is built on Firefox. think it through
MASSIVE UI, like what? Why does the UI take half the screen? I specifically left Firefox for Floorp because of the massive UI, and then left Floorp for Vivaldi once I got addicted to Workspaces and saw that Vivaldi just does them better as they are really well integrated. Zen doesn't provide me anything of value, and actually takes away some. So, no thanks.
Could you take a screenshot of its massiveness?
I'll admit I was a bit too harsh, but the UI I like to see on my browser is equivalent to Qutebrowser's aka close to none, just the slimmest tab bar possible.
Well, it's not bigger than Floorp or Vivaldi to me.
On Floorp, I used one of the old UIs from the settings, with bookmarks, panel and everything else disabled.
On Vivaldi, I use Custom CSS so I only get the tab bar (I'm experimenting with having it on the left hand side so I can see all my tabs and navigate more easily between them, with Ctrl-Up/Down to move focus, and Ctrl-Shift-Up/Down to move the tab in the list/stack)
Edit: Correction: On Floorp, I also got an address bar. On Vivaldi, I use a custom keybind to get the address bar to show up when I need it.