Been my daily driver for a WHILE now. Works fine for most things. Every now and then I run into some oddities.
My Thoughts on the Zen Browser
Submitted 1 month ago by popcar2@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://popcar.bearblog.dev/thoughts-on-zen-browser/
Comments
saga@lemm.ee 1 month ago
async_amuro@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Been using it for a while, I like it, but they do push out some questionable updates every now and then. Bugs I can understand, but forcing design changes on people aren’t great. Calling out the new tab change they made, I ended up changing a setting to deactivate it. Right now it’s my preferred browser, but I’m still open to looking into alternatives (Mac/Linux).
rfr_Foglia@feddit.it 1 month ago
It’s still a beta, I think it’s unfair to complain about drastic changes until it comes out
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Like the other person said, beta software is expected to go through pretty large design changes. It’s not a matter of “forcing it on the user” it’s a matter of “my software isn’t ready yet, I’m not certain what my vision is, and if you’re not willing to put up with me figuring out what I want out of this software then wait for it to release and I’ll keep it stable from there”
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
It’s in beta, so large changes are to be expected.
shiftymccool@programming.dev 1 month ago
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
True. The biggest difference seems to be that Arc is based on Chromium and Zen is based on Firefox. Given the two, I’d pick Zen just for the engine diversity.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Not even that. In addition to being proprietary, it requires an account to use.
ff0000@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Except Arc is basically abandoned by the company. Also Zen runs on Linux. Looks are somewhat similar but 🤷♀️
shiftymccool@programming.dev 1 month ago
Looks are somewhat similar but 🤷♀️
It’s a straight up copy. Somewhat similar… JFC
rfr_Foglia@feddit.it 1 month ago
But open source and built from Firefox
geography082@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It’s just… A browser…
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
With an opinionated way of how to navigate the internet, it’s maybe the most important app you can use
BugKilla@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I concur. I don’t want stylish. I want functional, compliant and for it not to harvest my fucking data. All that fucking flair and visual wankery can get in the bin if it’s not gonna do the essentials.
biofaust@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Zen browser is my daily browser since many months now. Most of your fair criticisms I have solved with Zen Mods and playing around in the settings.
The Widewine limitation is really why I will always keep another browser to fall back to: I recently discovered that all of Udemy is non-playable in Zen.
popcar2@programming.dev 1 month ago
I’ve started using more Zen Mods recently too, the most important one I would say is Zen Context Menu - which lets you de-clutter the options when you right click anything. There are way too many options being shown when you right clicked the sidebar, but it’s a lot nicer to use now.
xnx@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
How did you get that mod to work? I’ve been trying to use the mod but it doesn’t do anything I’ve enabled
Xanza@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I’ve stayed away from Firefox for almost a decade because I don’t like the way that it functions (and I generally don’t like Mozilla as a company) even though objectively it’s a better browser.
I’ve been using Zen for the past few days and I really enjoy it.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I’ll have to give it a shot then. I’m also not happy w/ Mozilla and I don’t really care too much about Firefox’s features, but I do want to support engine diversity, so I stick with it.
So Zen might just be my cup of tea. As long as I can block ads, use my password manager, sync tabs across my devices, and it’s not based on Chromium, I’m happy.
oldfart@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Has there been any progress in self-hosting sync server since Mozilla abandoned the old version a few years ago and created a behemoth with some exotic database that requires lots of resources?
Xanza@lemm.ee 1 month ago
As long as I can block ads
uBlock Origin / Privacy Badger work just fine.
use my password manager, sync tabs across my devices
🤷♂️
and it’s not based on Chromium
Nope.
cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
I’ve been using it for weeks and I think I’ll stick with it. It feels fresh and relaxed at the same time.
Myro@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Cool to see a possible replacement for Arc coming up now that The Browser Company put it aside. I loved it’s way of kind of forcing you to use a single window, but multiple instances of it, as well as Little Arc. Will keep monitoring Zen to see how it develops.
cevn@lemmy.world 1 month ago
One way to solve the “content appearing offset to right” problem is to move your tabs to the right side. Works pretty well for me…
harryprayiv@infosec.pub 1 month 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.
priapus@sh.itjust.works 1 month 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 1 month ago
Thanks for the update. I did read down the page and saw that. The dev looked really receptive, cooperative, and pro about it.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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.
xnx@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Down what page? The blog post?