Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

It baffles me that none of the browsers or extensions that implement sidebar tabs have this option.

Wonder if this still applies:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

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:

https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53

It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

E.g. seperated history suggestions or something?

Current MacOS on M2

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.