Zen: Firefox Based Browser | Hacker News Reader

Zen: Firefox Based Browser

zen-browser.app

72 pointsPalmik43 comments

I've been pretty happy with LibreWolf for a few months now, which has similar goals, but delivered in a less flashy package. My first instinct is to distrust this based on the flashiness alone.

For someone who's tried both: any reasons I should consider switching or not?

According to [this page][1] Zen is slightly faster than LibreWolf. But honestly, performance has been acceptable for me, so it's not something that would compel me to switch.

[1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/benchmarks

This seems to be meant as a Firefox-based alternative to Vivaldi and Arc (https://arc.net/). LibreWolf doesn't have similar goals.

Looking at Zen's landing page, Zen seems to have more of a focus on visual customization, whilst Librewolf is just Firefox with better privacy.

Personally I've never felt the need to customise the visuals of Firefox, so I'll stick with Librewolf.

Zen has an interesting privacy policy, saying they don't intentionally collect any data, but they also say:

> We try to disable all telemetry data collection in Zen Browser. But, we may have missed some. Check the below links for more information.

https://zen-browser.app/privacy-policy

Connects (at least) to:

- aus5.mozilla.org

- firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com

- location.services.mozilla.com

- push.services.mozilla.com

- redirector.gvt1.com

- s2.googleusercontent.com

- services.addons.mozilla.org

- support.mozilla.org

- zen-browser.app

Why even bother with this instead of just Firefox or an actual private fork like LibreWolf...

There are other reasons beyond privacy to use forks. For example I'm currently trying out Floorp, mainly due to the support of PWAs and better integration of vertical tabs with Sidebery. No CSS required to make the horizontal bar disappear

I may burn a lot of reputation with my comment ahead, but: I'm a bit tired of privacy-focused web browsers. As you just said, it's not the only use case there is.

What's the differentiation among all of these smaller niche browsers? Can't we escape sameness?

More context: It's not that I don't care about privacy, I do. I'm just fine with some defaults. I don't need (or want) something like Tails. There's some level of privacy that becomes unwieldy to manage.

There's a big difference with a full distribution like Tails and using a private-by-default browser like Librewolf.

> No CSS required to make the horizontal bar disappear

It's literally one line in userChrome.css:

  #TabsToolbar { display: none }

Is one line in userChrome.css worse than one line in user.js (where other Firefox customizations are made)?

Yeah, I've already switched back to Firefox. But I have to point out that Floorp has more features than just CSS. Support for installing PWAs and split-mode.

Big recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303974

I've been using Zen for around 2 months now as I mentally prepare to leave Google Chrome, and I have been pleasantly surprised. A few annoyances:

* there are bugs-- for example, I have been unable to launch Zen and I just get the bouncy icon on my macos task bar.

* when using the minimal tab view on the left hand pane, you cannot easily close tabs on a laptop because there is no "X" on hover-over

* for some reason youtube is less reactive than chrome. when I watch YT vids I frequently tap the right arrow key to skip ahead a few seconds, and there is a noticeable delay between zen and chrome. For now, I continue to use Chrome for YT videos.

YouTube in general performs worse on Firefox. My solution thus far has been to use alternative front ends (I host my own invidious instance).

Thanks, I am definitely going to look into this.

Is anyone interested in building embeddable version of Gecko, like Chromium, so it could be used and reused in other browsers? I remember way back ago there was some browser that allowed switching between several versions of browser engines, one of those was Trident (Internet Explorer), as Windows made it embeddable at the time. Having a solid base anyone or any team could build up UI and features to their liking more easily and keep up with security updates too.

I asked a similar question to the Firefox leadership few months ago. [0]

They feel like such effort will be of no use.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/were_the_f...

I have been looking for this for a while. I built a browser with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) a while back, but Google neutered all users of it by disallowing Google logins from it using opaque heuristics that were hard to work around.

I made a POC of using Qt to capture the FF window: https://github.com/cretz/ffembedpoc. But I fear if a browser engine becomes too easy to embed, large companies like Google will blackball it for fear of automated use, like they've done in the past.

I wish they had worked on better bookmarks instead of on a flashy appearance.

I couldn't agree more. Bookmarks are simply an after thought today, like RSS. I'm looking for a browser with decent bookmark management. Even just a notes field and a saved snapshot feature would do me. Currently I'm using Zotero for this, but it's a little OTT as a bookmark manager.

I use Pinboard.in, and I am stuck with Iridium, a good but Chromium-based browser that is rarely updated (a year ago, for OSX) because Chrome does bookmarks decently, unlike Firefox, at least in my opinion.

P.S. Zotero feels like overkill to me.

What does does Chrome do better? For example, Chrome lacks the ability to tag bookmarks.

I don’t tag my bookmarks. But playing around with them, renaming them, creating folders, moving them around etc is simple with Chrome/Chromium, and a pain in the neck with all the other browsers I tried.

Chrome is worse than Firefox, literally a name and URL for a link and name for folder. At least with Firefox you can tag bookmarks and use keywords.

I'm curious how Firefox comes off worse in your view, chrome seems to provide basic usage which Firefox also provides.

EDIT: just saw your other reply about it. Definitely can't agree, there's nothing fiddly with the way Firefox allows you to move, create, rename, delete, or update links and folders. Same functionality as chrome as far as I can tell.

I love the split tabs feature. I do wish it was a bit more fleshed out, however. For example, I'd like tabs opened from a split tab replace that tab in the split view when switched to.

The installer could be made a lot more user-friendly by including both sets of binaries, and then running AVX2 code as it’s first step. Whether an exception is raised (and caught) or not will then determine which set of binaries are installed.

Otherwise I could easily see many (average, non-technical) people trying to install the default and then just giving up when it does nothing but throw an error message upon launch.

I'm really happy to see Firefox-based web browsers. I don't have the manpower nor the resources myself to create my own, but this is definitely what the community needs in terms for backing down Chromium-based browsers.

I'd also be cool to have an embeddable Gecko to create web views in desktop apps, one that is not WebView2 or Electron. I bet that'd drive more the adoption.

Awesome, look great and a nice complement to LibreWolf I'd say.

A bit of choice and diverse ideas are very healthy for the ecosystem imo.

Switched to this from FF on both mac and win, very happy with it. I wish my configuration in the browser would easily apply to the rest of devices.

Does it support single sign on on windows?

SSO is a deal breaker for me

I think so? Couldn't find much information about its support on GH

Do any of these variants have cast functionality built-in?

Does it have passkey support? (google sign in?)

Is the macOS version still unsigned?

It’s signed now and is available through homebrew as well.

Tabs already allow split view

why not just use firefox?

Because Mozilla has made decisions which people disagree with (the mr. Robot thing, the new advertising thing, Pocket,...). Not saying 'Mozilla is terrible, everyone should switch', but it's understandable that some people may be through with some of these shenanigans.

> the Mr Robot thing

That passed me by: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

Oof.

This was such a mild thing that got so much pushback (meaning they won't do it again) that it makes me trust them more, not less. A disabled plug in that when enabled didn't really even do anything, compared to insert what any other browser does.

What is the issue with pocket? Sincerely interested

Installed by default. Bloat

They own it right?

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