Right now is the best period of time yet for Firefox-based browser, especially when most alternative browsers are Chrome-based.

While there are a bunch of forks like Librewolf and Palemoon, they provide features mainly for power users like hardened privacy and tweaked user-prefs. A year ago the only fork I knew of, based on recent stable versions of Firefox and added productivity features on top was Floorp. I was very surprised at the hype and sudden popularity of Zen Browser in the past few months and have been curious why it grew so much faster than Floorp which has been around for much longer, look at the Github star graph: https://star-history.com/#zen-browser%2Fdesktop=&Date=. Zen Browser currently has 19.3K stars while Floorp has 6.1K.

Reasons I can think of are the following: heavy promotion of the browser by the devs and community on places like Reddit along with emphasizing its ‘zen’ philosophy, really fast development (it now has way more features than Floorp), and the Zen mods store, where you can install CSS mods.

What are your thoughts and reasons for Zen Browser becoming so popular so fast? (while its not mainstream, it did grow fast in among Firefox and power users)

  • jia_tan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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    25 days ago

    Meanwhile that one MacOS user (me) waiting for them to properly integrate with apple’s passwords app and passkeys:

  • Litanys@lem.cochrun.xyzEnglish
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    26 days ago

    No clue why except i think people are mostly just really fed up with Mozilla making a non profit about everything but their browser. I could see a lot of people prefer the name and the willingness to try new stuff compared to floorp.

    But really i think most of it is it’s very different from Firefox and people are tired of Firefox… But still hate chromium.

  • Jomn@jlai.lu
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    24 days ago

    I really enjoy using Zen. It’s pretty, has plenty of neat features that don’t require extensions, and the development is very active. The software is not yet mature, so it frequently changes behaviours and how things look, so new users need to be aware of that.

    I did try Floorp a few months ago, but I didn’t like it as much. It felt like using regular Firefox with a few tweaks.

  • Codilingus@sh.itjust.works
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    26 days ago

    I like Zen so much I stopped browser hopping. It has sane defaults, vertical tabs default, and it’s x64_v3 optimized speed is nice. Default theming is nice, too.

  • Mac@federation.redEnglish
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    24 days ago

    Floorp causes me a ton of issues on DRM based streaming sites. F1TV being the worst

  • www-gem@lemmy.ml
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    26 days ago

    While I’ve tried both, I am not sensitive to any of these trends. I’m just glad to see some alternatives that can fit anyone needs. That’s the power of the open-source.

    Although I understand the reasoning beyond the language used in this post, I’m sad to read that hardened privacy is considered a power user thing.

    • TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
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      25 days ago

      Although I understand the reasoning beyond the language used in this post, I’m sad to read that hardened privacy is considered a power user thing.

      What’s really sad is the fact you need to make a bunch of convenience tradeoffs and go well out of your way for improved privacy, and on a browser that already has a lot of built-in features for privacy. And a downside of using a Firefox fork is not getting the latest Firefox updates ASAP, you have to wait for the fork to update. It goes to show how privacy-invasive the web is.

  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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    26 days ago

    What I’d really like is LibreWolf level privacy protection whilst the browser is running but that allows me to retain cache, history etc but also encrypts everything locally when the browser is closed and is password protected and only decrypts everything when the password is entered.

    • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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      25 days ago

      with linux and kde you could create an encrypted kde vault that’s mounted to your librewolf profile folder (and you can change librewolf settings to save history, cache, etc.)

      if you don’t want to use kde, it uses cryfs in the background, which has a cli tool as well. unmount the volume after using the browser and profit i guess, though i do agree with the other commenter that this doesn’t make much sense in my head.

    • aksdb@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      Is that really a relevent attack vector in your day to day use, that full disk encryption wouldn’t cover? My browser is rarely closed when I am on the PC, so it would be accessible (because unlocked).

  • vinnymac@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    Zen doesn’t even support passkeys properly. I stopped using it almost immediately after trying it. I attribute it to good marketing and PR as an Arc alternative. Especially after Arc showed their hand very clearly regarding how they’d respond to Manifest v3 and then the recent security fiasco.

    When everyone is in the market for a new Browser and you’re selling new ideas, you’ll find a lot of buyers. Hopefully from the ashes of Firefox someone comes out on top though. For now I’ll keep using my customized FF for everything, but I imagine that will have to change in the not too distant future.

      • arf@lemmy.todayEnglish
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        26 days ago

        I would never use it as a personal browser, mostly because I really only keep 2-5 tabs open at a time for personal stuff. However, Arc has been an absolute game changer for work. Just a couple of reasons:

        • The way it blend tabs and favorites prevents you from accidentally having multiple tabs of the same site open (though you still can have multiple when you want)
        • Workspaces have very little friction to them, and you can control whether they are sandboxed or not, which helps greatly manage my “hats” at work
        • Lots of smart keyboard shortcut options make zipping through common tasks a breeze
        • Their “Tidy Tabs” button uses an LLM to group similar tabs together, which is a lifesaver during big research sessions

        I hope their monitization plans succeed, because I’d hate to see this browser die.

  • arf@lemmy.todayEnglish
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    26 days ago

    Zen has the look and polish that makes it not feel like just another Firefox clone. It’s how I imagine people feel when using Microsoft Edge and Brave; there’s enough there to keep it perceptually separated from its Chrome base.

    Floorp was great, but it didn’t bring much to the table that you couldn’t already tweak yourself with base Firefox. Heck, projects like firebuilder let you build something close with a couple CLI prompts.

  • cevn@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    Zen has a superior UX out of the box but their decisions have been questionable. Recently Pinned tabs were changed to Essentials for seemingly no reason changing their behavior completely.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
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    25 days ago

    Maybe because Floorp (Additionally which is most likely a fork from a browser named midori), Uses a outdated version of firefox.

  • toastal@lemmy.ml
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    26 days ago

    Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality, but just that more authenticated Microsoft accounts, real or fake, have pressed a button—where the more popular/normie/maintstream languages/frameworks get the most signal. You can also read anecdotes thah some folks use this as a bookmark to look at later rather than actually using or enjoying a project.

    Free software doesn’t need to rely on a dubious value signal on a proprietary social media platform like MS Github.

    • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality

      Its funding track record is also pretty good it seems . no indication can prove a project is high quality, but it can help in deciding what to check out.

  • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    I’m sticking with Floorp for now. Faster development doesn’t mean it will be sustainable, but we’ll see. Or necessarily that all feayures may be good. More iant better. Brave and Opera GX have a bunch of features too.

    But I’m using Firefox and Floorp as a variant because I want something that gets fundamentals right. And if Zen becomes huge, great.

  • not_amm@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    26 days ago

    I ended up liking it a lot. I don’t know why or how, but it (as Flatpak) uses less RAM and CPU than native (RPM) Firefox, so I’ve been enjoying testing it as daily driver for basic navigation. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but Zen works fine, has good proposals and is still improving and hearing the community. Well done and well deserved

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
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      26 days ago

      Yeah because Flatpak firefox is damn insecure!

      Please dont use it. Firefox devs dont care. Flatpak restricts browsers from spawning “user namespace” sandboxes for filesystem isolation.

      Chromium uses a fork server (zygote) and breaks when it cannot spawn these sandboxes. So developers created zypak, which allows to isolate processes using bubblewrap, the Flatpak sandbox.

      Firefox just runs without a sandbox, and doesnt have a fork server, so nobody cares.

      Without process isolation, you have less duplicated content. THIS IS INSECURE.

      Please use a non-Flatpak Firefox version.

      There is no reason why a “Zen Browser” should use less RAM than Firefox.