Zen Browser

Zen
Zen Source code
Firefox fork and UI feels good.

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I am looking for the browser running servo.

This is in initial stage but with time i think this xan be good replacement for chromium and firefox.
As it written in rust servo engine under the supervision of Linux foundation.

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This looks very promising, though I have some concerns about how easy it is to install custom CSS from their theme store into the browser. Does anyone know if this is company backed? If not, then hopefully they can keep up with Firefox better than the other forks. I would really like PG’s Firefox recommendation to be replaced with something that actually respects the user out of the box; maybe this will be it, though it’s still in Alpha.

alpha build, domain registered less than 30 days ago. Stay away from these projects…

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It’s reaching 10k stars on github now, might surpass Brave and Ladybird at the end of this year :slightly_smiling_face:

i am very concerned this could be a honeypot. How on earth do they have nearly 10k stars within one month. All commits are done by the same user including various commits named “test*” directly to the main branch. A lot of red flags.

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It looks like this is a similar case that we had with Thorium and Floorp.

People just jump on the hype train for the new things, and in the end we end up not recommending any of these browsers.

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Well consider this: GitHub Star History it has gotten more then 1000 github stars every day since august 21. Those are numbers you don’t even get from major news coverage.

For comparison: Mullvad browser has 1.2k github stars in total.

Even Brave has 17k stars in total, at this rate it is set to over take it in about 5 days. That is rather suspicious if you ask me. I can understand hype trains, but THIS much?

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“hOnEyPOt” = ))

Theo from youtube asked his viewers to star it

Thorium is a hobby project, and there is nothing wrong with Floorp afaik, except that it’s Firefox ESR. Good browser.

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lol in the first few seconds they suggest to bypass gatekeeper because “signing applications is hard”. please do not take any advice from this kind of youtube experts.

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Yeah yeah. This is alpha software, the lack of signing in itself is not a massive deal imo. Also, it seems that the founder of CachyOS also contributes with the project. For the record I don’t think this should be recommended yet, it is alpha software. But, I don’t think it looks “suspicious”, at all.

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Sadly, since it’s posted in here, it’s a honeypot now : (


Btw, the signing issue is one of the pinned issues: Issues · zen-browser/desktop · GitHub .

Surprisingly, not everyone is an expert at program signing procedure.

also it costs money to have your application signed in macOS.

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Both aren’t valid reasons not to sign the browser.

Of course it’s not. But it doesn’t mean lol at "signing applications is difficult" either. No one above said they should NOT sign the program.

I think if this project keeps a steady pace both keeping up with upstream and maintaining features, it should be something that users can consider in the future

EDIT: Looks like code signing should be dealt with soon on both Windows and macOS looking through the issues

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This browser has to beat Mullvad Browser or at least prove to be better than Librewolf to be even considered. I doubt that it will happen.

PG is about privacy and security, not UI, UX, or features of browsers.

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Its based its defaults off yokoffing’s BetterFox so it is probably better than stock Firefox out the box

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Yes, but that doesn’t explain the sharp/unnatural exponential curve. The video was posted days after that sharp pivot, and doesn’t appear to have noticeably impacted the curve.


My first impression:

I briefly looked into Zen a week or two ago (only briefly), and (with the exception of the Vivaldi like UI redesign which I find attractive) it seemed fairly unexceptional-- and also seemed very close to the experimental UI that is already being worked on/tested in Firefox Nightly). It didn’t seem like there was any focus on privacy or security, or other notable comparative advantages beyond the UI.

SIde by side of Zen and Firefox Nightly w/ experimental sidebar redesign + vertical tabs:

I stopped looking into it, not because it seemed bad in any way, but just because it seemed pretty unexceptional beyond the UI/design tweaks, and many of those UI tweaks seem to be already present in Firefox Nightly (as well as at least one other Firefox derivative)

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