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Been my daily driver for a WHILE now. Works fine for most things. Every now and then I run into some oddities.
Been using it for a while, I like it, but they do push out some questionable updates every now and then. Bugs I can understand, but forcing design changes on people aren’t great. Calling out the new tab change they made, I ended up changing a setting to deactivate it. Right now it’s my preferred browser, but I’m still open to looking into alternatives (Mac/Linux).
It's still a beta, I think it's unfair to complain about drastic changes until it comes out
Like the other person said, beta software is expected to go through pretty large design changes. It's not a matter of "forcing it on the user" it's a matter of "my software isn't ready yet, I'm not certain what my vision is, and if you're not willing to put up with me figuring out what I want out of this software then wait for it to release and I'll keep it stable from there"
It's in beta, so large changes are to be expected. I don't think it's fair to blame them for design changes right now.
Looks just like Arc
True. The biggest difference seems to be that Arc is based on Chromium and Zen is based on Firefox. Given the two, I'd pick Zen just for the engine diversity.
Except Arc is basically abandoned by the company. Also Zen runs on Linux. Looks are somewhat similar but 🤷♀️
Looks are somewhat similar but 🤷♀️
It's a straight up copy. Somewhat similar.... JFC
But open source and built from Firefox
It's just... A browser...
With an opinionated way of how to navigate the internet, it's maybe the most important app you can use
I concur. I don't want stylish. I want functional, compliant and for it not to harvest my fucking data. All that fucking flair and visual wankery can get in the bin if it's not gonna do the essentials.
Zen browser is my daily browser since many months now. Most of your fair criticisms I have solved with Zen Mods and playing around in the settings.
The Widewine limitation is really why I will always keep another browser to fall back to: I recently discovered that all of Udemy is non-playable in Zen.
I've started using more Zen Mods recently too, the most important one I would say is Zen Context Menu - which lets you de-clutter the options when you right click anything. There are way too many options being shown when you right clicked the sidebar, but it's a lot nicer to use now.
How did you get that mod to work? I’ve been trying to use the mod but it doesn’t do anything I’ve enabled
It doesn't do anything by default, you have to go to settings > zen mods > click the settings icon next to the mod name.
If you set the options and nothing happened then I'm not sure, it worked for me instantly when toggling stuff off.
I've been using it for weeks and I think I'll stick with it. It feels fresh and relaxed at the same time.
Cool to see a possible replacement for Arc coming up now that The Browser Company put it aside. I loved it's way of kind of forcing you to use a single window, but multiple instances of it, as well as Little Arc. Will keep monitoring Zen to see how it develops.
I've stayed away from Firefox for almost a decade because I don't like the way that it functions (and I generally don't like Mozilla as a company) even though objectively it's a better browser.
I've been using Zen for the past few days and I really enjoy it.
I'll have to give it a shot then. I'm also not happy w/ Mozilla and I don't really care too much about Firefox's features, but I do want to support engine diversity, so I stick with it.
So Zen might just be my cup of tea. As long as I can block ads, use my password manager, sync tabs across my devices, and it's not based on Chromium, I'm happy. Bonus points if I can self-host the tab syncing.
Has there been any progress in self-hosting sync server since Mozilla abandoned the old version a few years ago and created a behemoth with some exotic database that requires lots of resources?
Idk, I haven't gotten to it yet on my self-hosting journey (still working on eliminating Google). Hopefully someone else has a good answer.
As long as I can block ads
uBlock Origin / Privacy Badger work just fine.
use my password manager, sync tabs across my devices
🤷♂️
and it’s not based on Chromium
Nope.
Yup. I'm just saying I don't particularly care if it's Zen or another browser, anything that fits those requirements is acceptable to me.
So yeah, I'll go test syncing tabs, since that's the most likely to have issues. If it supports Mozilla's Sync, we're good.
One way to solve the “content appearing offset to right” problem is to move your tabs to the right side. Works pretty well for me..