One thing that seems to be missing from most Zen promotion is that Firefox has a huge collection of add-on options/extentions. Hard to beat of you’re reliant on several of them. Keeps me from even trying it.
Zen is a fork of Firefox, supports Firefox extensions, and retains the built-in access to the Mozilla extension/theme stores from vanilla Firefox. If you go to install an addon, it even gives a popup to “Add to Firefox”.
It’s a good browser with only minor issues. I’m on Win10; automatic updates don’t always succeed, and it seems like it blocks some communication between the 1password desktop app and the browser extension because I have to sign into each separately. Otherwise, I prefer it to Firefox in pretty much every way.
While like other have said, extensions do work, I wouldn’t expect zen to prioritize extension compatibility. I’ve been following development and it seems like a personal project
It would be good for them to make sure it’s clear that it’s a fork of Firefox and supports addons in their marketing! Right now it’s quite a ways down the home page.
Zen supports the add-ons and extensions from FF. (Source: been using it for about a month)
Check out the official website, it explains many more features https://zen-browser.app/
Is there any reason to use this over Librewolf?
no, if you don’t care about vertical tab bar. also you can apply the betterfox scripts into your librewolf user.js.
The UI/UX. Nothing else, to be fair. They have some nice features (like ‘glance’), too
Practically speaking, probably not.
I am sure the article is written by chatGPT
Yeah, reads more like a wikipedia article than a news article, like someone took several sources and told ai to combine the info. Facts are great, but they don’t make for a captivating read on their own. There’s a sweet spot for opinion/reflection without too much bias that makes news sources worth reading.
I expected so much more from a website called “techwavearena” /s
After many years of using FFox, I just tried a Zen install on Linux. It did not turn out as well as I hoped.
I did not have FFoxesr installed in the way the OS would have installed it (though it was still in the user folder). This meant that Zen did/could not see my bookmarks, extensions or passwords … and the options it offered didn’t work out. (It wanted an HTML bookmarks file … I had them saved as JSON … and a ‘CSV’ (??) passwords file … wherever that is … and it found no extensions folder.) So, for starters, years of customizations had to be manually restored.
But, fair shake, I did manually re-install bookmarks AND a few extensions that had saved databases (e.g. UBO, NoScript, Block site). (It ignored the sub-folders in the JSON bookmarks folders, dumping all bookmarks into the top-levels.) And I had to re-create all the settings. (Most of which exist in the .mozilla folder on Linux … easy to find.)
I played for an hour with what I put there (without a menu bar … or a tab bar, all URIs are shoved together -by name- in a sidebar … I did figure out how to see a bookmark bar). I could discern no -truly useful- advantages to it. None. That was not offset by some pretty cosmetics. So even if you do get all of your customizations past the one-size-fits-all install, for long-time FF users I see no substantial advantages to the Zen browser.
