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Comment by ToyKeeper | Hacker News Reader

I would like my extensions to support every browser possible, but if a browser only runs on Mac, I won't be able to test my stuff in it. I've had users asking me for Orion support for ages, and I keep telling them I'll add it once I can run it... but now it looks like that's not going to happen.

Dropping the ports doesn't necessarily make the Mac version better. It makes the entire browser unsupportable by developers who want to make their sites/programs/extensions work in Orion but can't run it.

So my support list now is...

- Supported: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Floorp, Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, Librewolf, Waterfox, Ungoogled Chromium, Thorium, Mullvad, Tor, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, ... - Impractical to support: Orion - Impossible to support: Zen Browser

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Dang, looking at this later, I realize I forgot again that HN doesn't support common list formatting. If I put one "- item" per line, it joins them all into a single paragraph. And now it's too late to edit. It should work if I put a blank line between each item though.

That last bit was supposed to say:

- Supported: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Floorp, Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, Librewolf, Waterfox, Ungoogled Chromium, Thorium, Mullvad, Tor, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, ...

- Impractical to support: Orion

- Impossible to support: Zen Browser

This probably won't be the last time I trip over that. I use lists a lot, and almost every other platform allows them to be one per line without anything between.

Out of curiosity, what prevents extension support in Zen? How is it different from the other Firefox forks? It has releases for all 3 major platforms.

The full answer for this is a long, wild ride which would fill entire chapters... but the short answer is: Zen's author broke the extension API so badly it's literally impossible to do a lot of what my extension needs to do... and the author is aggressively opposed to fixing it or even admitting that he broke it.

More generally, Zen Browser is the buggiest browser I've ever encountered... by a wide margin. Some of the issues are jaw-dropping. It's notorious for losing user data. And looking at its history, it has mostly just kept getting worse over time. Extensions which used to work don't any more, because he keeps breaking more and more stuff.

I tried to support it. But instead, I got a quick education on why nothing supports Zen Browser. They can't... because of the guy behind it. Sometimes due to his incompetence, sometimes because he actively intervenes when people try to support it.

So... my experience with Zen Browser rapidly went from "hey this seems neat" to "wouldn't touch this with a ten meter pole".

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