I think I’ve finally found it: The elusive Firefox fork for my day-to-day needs. It needed to have sane defaults like Librewolf but also as user empowering as Vivaldi (as well as not being proprietary which is cringe).
Zen I believe accomplishes both of that. It’s a relatively new project but it does have active development with new changes added every release. Here’s the rundown:
- Licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the same as Firefox. So enjoy that warm feeling you get when using open source software that won’t pull the rug from under you.
- Follows Firefox release cycles: If a new Firefox version comes out, Zen is not behind.
- Instead of horizontal tabs, Zen only uses vertical tabs for navigation. If this is a deal breaker, then Zen isn’t for you :(
- Supports split view, workspaces, browser profiles, side panels, tab unloading (saving memory by deactivating a tab), theming, mods and everything else that base Firefox supports (like firefox sync).
- Cannot play DRM-protected content as of yet on Windows and MacOS (rare Linux W?) due to license fees. This is your netflix, your disney+, your spotify.
- No mobile version (nor does it seem to be planned), though firefox sync is still supported.
- Looks GORGEOUS. I never realized how ugly Firefox looks by default, esp on desktops like GNOME and KDE where it tries to integrate itself into the system theme.
- Performs FABULOUSLY: Optimizations from the firefox level to even providing an optimized binary executable for modern CPUs.
- SANE defaults like HTTPS everywhere, no link prefetching (where the browser loads links that it thinks you’re going to go to), uncluttered Firefox home.
- Probably more I’m not listing
Download here: https://zen-browser.app/download
How do I use Zen?
Well firstly, Zen doesn’t come with any extensions by default. So I made sure to chuck in my Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs, LibRedirect, etc. It also uses secure DNS by default with Cloudflare so you might want to turn that off (I have a DNS homeserver that does encrypted DNS through other means).
I also really like using the side panel to put my wiki sites and dictionaries in. I’ve only been using Zen for a week now and it seems to be my forever browser of choice.
I just installed it with Flatpak on my Fedora Macbook. I need to play around with it, but my 5-minute impression is so far pretty good. I don’t really get the point of the sidebar since I use the web search plugin for KRunner on my main desktop. I guess it’s good for people who don’t have KRunner since they could add a bunch of commonly used websites like Wikipedia and Google Translate.
Edit:
Split tab is very interesting. Not good for the laptop because the screen size is too small but it can have good use for my desktop.
I still have to use tree style tabs to be able to organize my tabs in a tree structure, but I’m (mostly) able to hide the default tabs unlike Firefox where the horizontal tabs sitting awkwardly on the top alongside the tree style tabs.