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Comment by InsideOutSanta | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would cancel the Mac version as well. It really has no clear purpose and just further dilutes the "alternatives to Chrome" space. If they have money to spend on a browser, why not put that effort into a browser that actually has a chance to tilt the scales a bit, like Zen?

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> why not put that effort into a browser that actually has a chance to tilt the scales a bit, like Zen?

Zen is a Firefox (skin? fork?), and the Firefox community is their own niche (and IMHO, more Linux/Windows-focused rather than Mac). I think Kagi's focus on Mac made WebKit a natural choice, even though Firefox would've been the more platform-independent choice (as in being able to make the one browser for all three platforms, rather than bringing one to Mac, then another to Linux and to Windows).

Firefox has never really felt at home to me on Mac. I've used Safari (and previously Orion) ever since letting go of Chrome for most personal use.

FWIW, I find Zen on macOS to have much less of that uncanny clunky foreign feel that Firefox and its brethren such as Thunderbird on macOS have never been able to shake. It’s no Camino[0], but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen since to a Gecko browser that feels like it actually belongs on macOS.

I’d rather see Orion continue to be developed alongside Zen though, because goodness knows we need more non-Chromium browsers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)

You might want to revisit Firefox once again now that they have done another major redesign.

The issue with Firefox isn’t so much its visual design (though it is a component) as it is things like interactions all feeling a bit “off” and little bits of lag scattered throughout (like frames for controls and windows being blank for a split second before drawing in). It gives a “made in my back yard” impression, and not in the good handcrafted way but rather the duct tape and bubblegum way.

I don’t think Mozilla is going to be able to escape this so long as the they continue to use their current UI stack.

Doesn't Zen use the same UI stack?

> and the Firefox community is their own niche

I don't think most people care about the engine that powers their browser. They care if it's fast, renders the sites they need, has a pleasant user interface, and doesn't crash.

A Gecko-based browser can do all of that.

FWIW, for me personally, particularly with newer versions, there has never been a moment when I felt Zen didn't fit on my Mac just fine.

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