Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
zen-browser.app
zen-browser.app
- If you want to have two web pages side-by-side, you don't need a web browser that can handle split panes. Just have each web page in its own window and use your window manager to put them side-by-side. Tiling window managers will do this automatically.
- If you want to have several web pages open but not visible, so that you can switch between them (i.e., tabs), just use your window manager's tabs, stacks, or workspaces.
- If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs.
- If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces. You can even name workspaces according to projects or tasks, and assign windows to them automatically.
Any modern window manager will do, but ones with automatic tiling are the best. Sway, i3, Monad, Hyprland, Awesome, and Newm are a few.
I think a 'mail' workspace is useful - especially if those tabs aren't running when you switch workspaces... haven't tried it yet, how's it much different to a 'mail' folder with bookmarks inside).
I can't understand people who want 100 tabs open. Neer happened to me, I think going on over 20 or 30 is getting crazy already and time to sort things out.
> If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs.
Bookmarks and history have very different UX from tabs, they are clunky to use and I would never prefer them to opening 100 tabs, sorry.
> If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces
These workspaces don't enable separation of cookies and other state, they have a very different use case to browser workspaces.
> - If you want to have two web pages side-by-side, you don't need a web browser that can handle split panes. Just have each web page in its own window and use your window manager to put them side-by-side. Tiling window managers will do this automatically.
I feel Edge does this better then any browser or WM. As a user, I don't want to see the browser's window border, or UI duplicated. Edge has a very easy and friendly split view does exactly what I would expect.
> - If you have want to have 100 tabs open, you should be using bookmarks or history instead of tabs.
I'm sorry, but I am not going to add every article I may want to read later as a bookmark or add to my history. If I added it as a bookmark and read it, I'll have to remove it as a bookmark next. That's already more steps then just opening it in a background tab by middle clicking my mouse and closing the tab after reading it. My bookmarks are for items that I want to keep, not one time uses.
> - If you want to have different workspaces, profiles, or so on, use your window manager's workspaces. You can even name workspaces according to projects or tasks, and assign windows to them automatically.
Nope. I have different profiles for my browser to seperate accounts, cookies, history, settings, etc... I don't think a WM could do this like using a browser could. In Edge I can just open the browser in my work profile and my Google work account is logged in with my Slack as a pinned tab versus using my personal profile and having my personal Google account logged in with YT Music as a pinned tab. This is a critical feature to me.
The "just use bookmarks, bro" mindset comes from their foregone conclusion that windows are good, tabs are bad, therefore anything that favours tabs is also bad and should be done differently if you insist on doing it at all. Just let people have tabs.
I suspect it really is as simple as 'tabs are always visible'. Hidden behind a menu, it's easy to forget bookmarks exist unless you really buy into that way of working and open your bookmarks menu frequently. Tabs are the 'default' alternative. However, I do think most browser bookmarking could be improved immeasurably — start by having a proper bookmark manager, similar to something like Pinboard.
This is all kind of just your opinion that you are stating as hard fact
More fluid tab experience looked nice - though I don't prefer vertical tabs, I liked that I could drag to make them bigger/compact, drag them to top/bottom/sides, and use a shortcut to HideUI.
HideUI is the single most loved feature of this 'Firefox' for me. To get rid of the tab/tool/URL bars, but have access (via keyboard/mouseover) is awesome... though better if we could assign something like F7 tabs F4 toolbar.
I wish we were in a world in which this is realistic. I can’t think of any major environment in which this is practical (maybe KDE has some plugin …).
Microsoft once experimented with what I consider to be the right approach (https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65cfl8/microsoft...), but it didn’t get far.
Some feedback:
- Web Panels: have an option for letting CTRL + Click (or other shortcut) open the link in the Web Panel sidebar. Drag and dropping the link into the sidebar would be a good shortcut as well. This works for use cases like browsing a search results page, and opening multiple links without losing focus on the search results page itself.
- Horizontal Nav Bar: Vivaldi and Arc browser both have no horizontal bar taking up real estate. Maybe this is not possible to replicate with an FF fork, but having sidebar navigation AND a mostly full size top nav bar is redundant.
And I know somebody, somewhere, is going to argue that it should be the job of the desktop.
I disagree.
I don't want to have to create each context I want things to exist in, and manipulate that carefully.
I like automatic context. That's why I like tabs in my browser and not a thousand windows. And that's why I enjoy my split views to be inside the tabs I just created.
The extension in question is authored by Mozilla.
In the case of extensions like this one should be asking , “Do I trust the author?”
There are decade-old "everyone agrees this sucks, please fix it" bugs in bugzilla that are ignored because nobody in management or development cares. It's not sexy, can't go on their resume, it won't let them give presentations at conferences, or get them on people's podcasts, or tweeted about...
Using your anger/passion to try and sway people to be even less involved doesn't help anyone.
You didn’t address his statement nor his concerns.
You avoided that part of the conversation to basically tell him to shut up.
Address the issues first, like Firefox management team should be doing, but aren’t.
I’m with OP. Firefox is a horrible user experience. And it’s that way by design. Couldn’t have Google stop paying Mozilla’s bills now could they?
KennyBlanken said don't bother to vote on ideas because they wont listen.
I pointed out that many ideas are in development or have been delivered (i.e. they do listen).
The rest seems pretty boring to discuss and unlikely to be a productive conversation. I'm already bored trying to explain this.
So what? Does it invalidate the critics of glacial speed of making other improvements?
at /$bunfs/root/firebuilder-darwin-arm64:24339:34
24322 | import {parseArgs} from "util"; 24323 | import {homedir as homedir2} from "os"; 24324 | var __dirname = "/Users/tjs/Documents/.coding/firefox-profile-creator"; 24325 | var APP_PATH = join8("/Applications", "Firefox.app", "Contents", "MacOS", "firefox"); 24326 | var PROFILES_PATH = resolve4(homedir2(), "Library", "Application Support", "Firefox", "Profiles"); 24327 | var args = parseArgs({ args: Bun.argv, options: { launch: { type: "boolean" } }, allowPositionals: true }); ^ TypeError: Unknown option '--help'. To specify a positional argument starting with a '-', place it at the end of the command after '--', as in '-- "--help" code: "ERR_PARSE_ARGS_UNKNOWN_OPTION"
at /$bunfs/root/firebuilder-darwin-arm64:24327:12
I'll fix asap
Firefox is great for modding because everything is contained in one profile folder, so one can simply make a new profile folder however they want and have the perfect browser
I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up!
My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.
I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.
Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
(It's happening.gif)
But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions.
I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.
gestures for reload/back/forward? really?
several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really?
a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years?
using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!
i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead.
so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
This is official supported add-on
$ firefox 'ext+container:name=HN&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid=41311435'I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz To access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type Ctrl+L. For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type Ctrl+1, 2… or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through.
I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.
How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?
And about privacy ...
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for my web browser if it's good. I wouldn't pay for Mozilla's FF, but I would pay for a fork of it by a company whose business model doesn't involve ads or selling data. I happily pay for Kagi, and will happily pay for the app that I use the most.
If they lost the Google revenue they wouldn't just have to fire "the C suite" but lay off most of their engineers. An independent browser engine is a project with code in the tens of millions of lines, you obviously need to pay hundreds or of engineers to work on this, which is why there's pretty much only three competitive ones, all maintained with significant resources.
It's a large code base, but it doesn't require hundreds of developers working concurrently to keep it up to date. Web standards move fast, but not that fast.
Take a look at Ladybird. There's a browser being built from scratch with a small team (less than 10?)
If Mozilla fired 90% of it's employees and kept the 10% to actually work on Firefox, it could be a great browser.
In 2009 they had a 30% market share.
Now they have a 5-6% market share.
4/5ths of their market share, gone.
Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do not forwardly present writings on how they do these things, leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and there but not much more.
Not saying such features in apps must also be appealing to you as well or anything equally silly, just whether or not they are appealing is more hinged on that base question of whether you like the idea of nested organizational structures than whether or not your window manager has a similar tiling feature.
Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if they all deferred to sway. I’m just not sure how to do that well with easy switching between windows and I don’t know if vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?
Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim -> helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.
But what that really means is, while ssh-tmux-vim is great when you need it, local UIs could be so much richer, and I would never know because I am still tied to using my local machine as if it were a remote host.
I should stop writing about it and just do something. I have a feeling that using native sway tabs for everything might be fantastic, if I can get over the hump of making the change.
Tmux and vim splits, the competition between them can be a little annoying. Mostly I prefer tmux splits, but the shared yank buffers and ability to link scrolling in vim is really nice.
You can open a terminal in vim somehow IIRC, maybe vim as a multiplexer is the way to true enlightenment, haha.
I tried to use it on my macOS Apple Silicone and got an error about it being broken and macOS suggested to trash it. Not sure if it is a bug issue. Will come back and try it again though to give it a second chance :)
- this app won't see much adoption and will eventually fall out of maintenance, or
- the developers are going to be a pain in the ass to work with,
or both.
Not that it helps, but its kind of an easy error to make. I want to try it too but I guess I'll wait.
It baffles me that none of the browsers or extensions that implement sidebar tabs have this option.
zen also has a "compact mode" than hides the native tabs, but it hides other things you might want as well
Wonder if this still applies:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
- I feel more passion from the author.
- I value the pride they show in their work.
- I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful software will actually report it's less buggy.
The problem is when someone makes appearances more important than being useful.
But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt.
We need more browser diversity.
But... this is literally form over function.
Browsers should be like car tyres. Only after you have selected for your functional use case and requirements, do you filter for visual aesthetics.
Ladybird does, but it’s not really ready for prime time yet
For browsers in particular, that is a major reason why I don't use any of the existing Firefox forks: they are all very utilitarian. But I look at a browser window pretty much all day long, so I prefer a visual design that brings me joy.
This sounds like a marketing-speak. Joy is not an experience gained by staring at the visual design of a browser. You are confusing joy and another experience, perhaps appeal or attraction.
If you genuinely experience joy from browser visual design, you are probably that same guy who experiences “delight” when a customer support representative treats you well on a phone call.
They may be both of those things! But I can't help that my first conceit is always to think "that's not yours to decide here".
Contrary to modern misconception, beauty is objective. Taste is subjective. What makes good taste is alignment of the subjective with the objective.
So, in this case, we can ask "what makes a browser beautiful?". Well, since it is a tool, then its usefulness is intrinsic to the kind of thing it is. So, how useful it is as browser is constitutive of its beauty, as beauty has to do with the perfection with which something realizes the kind of thing it is.
All the same, I find it useful to know that the authors of the software consider "beauty" one of their goals. And beauty does not preclude utility.
> Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with features.
If I'm going to put in the effort to create something like this. There is ONE powerful reason which compels me to do this. If I'm pitching this to an investor, then I need to craft a message to convince the investor to hand over money. The above line is wasting space.
I get a sense that the message is either crafted by developers who are horrible at doing so, or by copy people who know nothing about the product. And in neither case does anyone spend significant time finding and interacting with passionate potential users to find what sorts of messaging resonates with them. As with writing, you need to find your voice, and let that voice drive the messaging.
Personally, I wouldn't even bother starting such a project if I didn't get to the "find your voice" part. Maybe the developers have some hand-wavy plan to sell options and accessories rather than having a strong starting point to solving a problem.
But is it really the most important thing you have to say about a new browser?
It's just marketing language after all. A lot of great products are marketed using this repulsive language. I couldn't care less.
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
I also found this somewhat funny:
# Edit: ok, ill remove it, goodbye top #1 on fastest browsers benchmark :[
# ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries
It said "Zen Browser" is damaged and can't be opened, you should reject the disk image.
edit: it's a known thing to do with Apples security, workarounds in step 3 here:
Too bad, I was excited by the idea, but this is just unprofessional and I really need to trust my browser.
Or they just prefer to not go out of their way to support the walled garden that is the Apple ecosystem. Principles beat professionalism any day for me.
[1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-macos#step-3-byp...
But, I’m logged in, say, in the same GitHub or Google account across workspace.
Profiles on the other hand (I’ve used those on Arc) change where you are logged in… so I can be logged in to my work gmail on one profile, and to my personal gmail on another.
Personally I don’t find profiles that useful just for the fact that I simply use different browsers for personal and work… but a use case for profiles is, for example, to be signed in as admin and user to your local dev web application and test things between the two just by changing tabs instead of having to logout and login
it's the same as opening a new window for me. meh.
None of those on their own are groundbreaking, but all together they make for a compelling differentiator (for me anyways, but I have ADHD so prioritize different things than most).
Describing all that as "absolutely nothing [other than a new window]" is not accurate at all.
Exact match with Firefox v129.0.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
He's asking about how the browser identifies itself to the Windows operating system. According to him, other forks say simply "Firefox," which makes it impossible to run them alongside the official Firefox release.
It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.
I'm sticking with Firefox. I like the account features (sync, send tab to another device etc) but Firefox's killer feature is container tabs, especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for container selection, and the other add-on that automatically handles AWS SSO accounts.
Which add-on is that? It would be quite helpful.
When your coming directly from Chrome, then maybe you see the problems more? I know I started really disliking Chrome, mostly do to the UI and the developer tools (which is worse that Firefox and much worse than the old Opera, in my opinion).
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/404408660a4d976e2a...
It's shocking that there isn't a decent chromium based browser that supports extensions on android.
It makes sense that Chrome has never built it, have to keep the users from using Adblock.
I hate the Chrome fonts for this reason.
I'm surprised Mac users are noticing a difference though, I find the difference basically vanishes on really high res displays (like my QHD-ish panel on my Framework 13).
It’s to the point that I just can’t use, say, VS Code on a monitor that is not Hi-DPI.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the font doesn’t look better. Maybe it’s aesthetically more pleasing but to me, it’s just harder to read.
I have multiple eye issues that may not help and which make me more demanding but since I don’t have this issue with OS rendered fonts, I consider this to be an issue.
When I saw that, I thought, “Yep. We’ve come full-circle.” Chrome really is the new IE.
I honestly do not understand why there’s this little testing being done. Yeah, Chrome is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that other browsers should not be used or don’t exist. It‘s actively harming users. In our software development projects (HPC software), we deliberately test with all compilers available on HPC systems, just to ensure that nothing breaks…
Since it's just a Firefox reskin, I was able to login with my Mozilla account and sync my extensions, Tree Style Tabs included. Enabling Zen's "compact mode" turns it into a pretty ideal setup for TST, since the default tab list disappears entirely. Still would be nice to not need TST in the first place.
Workspaces seem like a nice idea in theory, though currently underbaked in practice. Deleting a workspace appears to be bugged at the moment; attempting to do so just switches to the workspace instead of deleting it. It'd be great if they could integrate with Containers; I'd love to be able to e.g. set a default container for a given workspace (and then all tabs in that workspace would default to that particular container).
The Zen Sidebar is pretty cool; I can see myself using the premade Wikipedia and Google Translate panels quite a bit, in addition to setting up some of my own. Resizing the Sidebar is pretty finicky, unfortunately; dragging the edge will often fail and cause the Sidebar's size to snap to a tiny width.
Zen seems to have a built-in profile switcher, which is interesting, but seems redundant with Containers and way more limited. I also don't know why it defaulted to creating both "Default (alpha)" and "Default Profile" profiles, nor do I know why it set "Default (alpha)" as the default. I assume because this is an alpha release?
I don't know if Zen changes enough for me to prefer using it over normal Firefox (especially with Firefox's own vertical tab and sidebar improvements on the horizon), but I appreciate that this exists and look forward to seeing where it goes.
Then I found this issue, where essentially they left a huge backdoor open with Remote Debugger: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927. The guy claims that it was due to ignorance, but seeing this really shakes up my paranoia. Luckily I haven't typed any credential into the app. From a security-minded user's perspective, this is not a good sign. I hope that they would really put privacy & security forward, get some 3rd party security audits.
If their target audience is disgruntled Firefox users that makes a ton of sense. I would not consider replacing Firefox with a browser based on Chrome/Chromium. It's not that I think it a bad rendering engine, it not, but I don't like the mono-culture that has been promoted and would like to avoid contributing to it, if I can.
Compared to Brave in what terms? Speed, not sure, but Chromium is known to be better. As far as I know, Brave doesn't allow split tabs or workspaces though.
Not sure about workspaces, is it like profiles?
Any idea if Zen supports this? And ctrl-tab for quickly cycling between recent tabs (even across Spaces)?
1 When is the earliest we can try tab grouping in Firefox Nightly? 2 Will the following things be available, the ability to group by dragging and dropping a tab, the ability to name and change the name, assign a color, and pin and hide a tab group, and the option to sleep tabs in groups? 3 Is the Workspaces feature being considered, it is quite popular and has been implemented in Floorp and Zen? 4 Is tab grouping also considered for the Android version of Firefox? 5 Are there any plans for a Portable version with a built-in dark theme for websites? Thank you very much! We are very sad that many features have been removed, tab grouping, pwa, rss, compact mode, menu icons, etc., hopefully this will all be coming to Firefox and such mistakes will not be made again.
Reddit launch of the project about 4 months ago.
Fantastic project and already very polished browser. Really enjoying it!
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/tree/main/src/browser... has a submodule pointing to https://github.com/zen-browser/components/tree/dab7fd0b2fbf2... which isn't public... I assume that's an oversight.
I'm very happy to see a new modern browser not based on Chromium. Will definitely test drive it to see if it's worth switching to.
I couldn't find any Firefox extension that does this (Or maybe I didn't look hard enough)
This is the one feature that brought me to Arc
(I've since stopped using Arc, and moved to Vivaldi. My "main" browser is still Firefox)
I really like that Zen offers two options, a setup wizard and a portable binary.
looking forward to seeing this mature
I tried switching to arc, but it didn't stick since I really got used to the Firefox way of life. The arc browser also felt really commercial and has a lot of gimmicky AI features, which is not optimal.
This Zen browser is like a blend of the best of both worlds!
Anyway, it looks good on the first try. Will give it a good try for a month or so before committing to it.
Does it have "profiles" feature like Vivaldi?
I'll try Zen.
What does that even mean?
I downloaded Zen and what do i see a top bar which I can not hide or at least I can not find how to do it.
I get that this ia an alpha but yeah going back to arc feels much smoother
From a user perspective, I see no difference between Blink, Webkit and Gecko. And when there is, it's a website that has only been tested on Blink, or uses features not available elsewhere.
Luckily Gecko also performs the best for me.
One more smart thing to do would be to open different workspace by middle click on the workspace name or giving options to open from the list.
So, the opening is there, can’t blame people for trying to fill it.
OTOH this is just a Firefox fork advertised as a new browser.
We had a browser aiming towards being a full on Rust application, and I was excited and cheering that on, not because it was Rust, but because the focus by shifting to Rust was security and speed. Now I'm not sure the focus.
I like how sleek this browser looks, and the "themes" seem to target very specific needs of minimalizing the UI which I also appreciate. I'll have to pull this one down for my Linux box to try it out.
THIS! This is the first thing I do after installing firefox. Nice to see I'm not the only one :)
1:(As in the pre Chrome meaning of the word)
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app
edit: turns out they are describing this process here from a link on the macos download page:
Also while I understand some people have moral objections to the 100 dollar/euro registration fee, clearly a lot more than that has been spent in time to get the application to this stage, almost all apps for macOS distributing like this are notarized now, and with such a slick marketing page it just feels weird to then not spend a relatively small amount of money to make this immediately far more accessible. The instructions aren't hard to follow, but still make trying it out 10-100x harder.
Also it's tricky to get donations for something that literally prevents people using the application, no one is going to donate for the registration fee before even trying it, and once they've gotten through the installation process there's no incentive to donate for that anymore.
E.g. seperated history suggestions or something?
Current MacOS on M2
When you enter a restaurant or hotel, and the lobby is disheveled, the parts you can't see likely won't be of a higher standard. Not for me yet.
No browser that I've seen comparing itself to arc really does this. I downloaded zen and looked at it for like 30 seconds and it doesn't look like it does this either.
Who is the target audience? That website has so many oversimplified marketing claims that are about security and customization. It seems wholly undecided if the target audience is people who fall for buzz words or someone actually interested in quantitative improvements over Firefox.
And yet the comparison is just checkboxes and not even including base Firefox. How about bar graphs for comparison and some actual pictures of the advertised customization, layout and workspaces?
To me this still feels a little shady, even though the features seem nice.
When I think of browser devs, I don't think about fancy UI, and blazingly fast speeds! I think about engineers who know what they're talking about.
I've never heard of floorp, and the arguments against librewolf are silly. On top of that, some of these "features" like themes, profile switching are already in FireFox. So again, why would I choose Zen?
I don't see how this project adds any value to the very mature FF, it's just piggybacking imo.