Comment on My Thoughts on the Zen Browser
harryprayiv@infosec.pub 3 days ago
Nixpkgs has been working on packaging it for more than 6 months now. I used it in an appImage and came away unimpressed. I love the minimalism but I just wish it had better security and rendered webpages better. On Brave, websites literally look sharper than on Zen.
Yeah, that’s always my first concern with forks like this. I care a lot more about security updates than UX.
I used to use Mull on Android, but then the dev abandoned it and left me open to security vulnerabilities, so now I’m back on Fennec, which seems to stay updated. If Zen can stay patched, ideally in a largely automated fashion, maybe I’ll give it a shot.
Down what page? The blog post?
priapus@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
That comment about their security updates is a couple of months old. Zen has made significant changes to how they handle releases to stay up to date with Firefox, some of which were mentioned in the thread.
The Nix package is functional. Nixpkgs sometimes chooses not to add beta software that is receiving very frequent updates, especially if the package takes a lot of resources to build. In those cases, it makes more sense for the package to be maintained outside of Nixpkgs for the time being. NixOS users can get Zen from this Flake, which patches the official binary. COSMIC Desktop is another example of this.
harryprayiv@infosec.pub 2 days ago
Thanks for the update. I did read down the page and saw that. The dev looked really receptive, cooperative, and pro about it.
priapus@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Agreed. I doubt he expected the project to be anywhere near this popular considering how many Firefox forks there are, and he’s been doing a great job keeping up with everything that popularity comes with.