I think I’ve finally found it: The elusive Firefox fork for my day-to-day needs. It needed to have sane defaults like Librewolf but also as user empowering as Vivaldi (as well as not being proprietary which is cringe).
Zen I believe accomplishes both of that. It’s a relatively new project but it does have active development with new changes added every release. Here’s the rundown:
- Licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the same as Firefox. So enjoy that warm feeling you get when using open source software that won’t pull the rug from under you.
- Follows Firefox release cycles: If a new Firefox version comes out, Zen is not behind.
- Instead of horizontal tabs, Zen only uses vertical tabs for navigation. If this is a deal breaker, then Zen isn’t for you :(
- Supports split view, workspaces, browser profiles, side panels, tab unloading (saving memory by deactivating a tab), theming, mods and everything else that base Firefox supports (like firefox sync).
- Cannot play DRM-protected content as of yet on Windows and MacOS (rare Linux W?) due to license fees. This is your netflix, your disney+, your spotify.
- No mobile version (nor does it seem to be planned), though firefox sync is still supported.
- Looks GORGEOUS. I never realized how ugly Firefox looks by default, esp on desktops like GNOME and KDE where it tries to integrate itself into the system theme.
- Performs FABULOUSLY: Optimizations from the firefox level to even providing an optimized binary executable for modern CPUs.
- SANE defaults like HTTPS everywhere, no link prefetching (where the browser loads links that it thinks you’re going to go to), uncluttered Firefox home.
- Probably more I’m not listing
Download here: https://zen-browser.app/download
How do I use Zen?
Well firstly, Zen doesn’t come with any extensions by default. So I made sure to chuck in my Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs, LibRedirect, etc. It also uses secure DNS by default with Cloudflare so you might want to turn that off (I have a DNS homeserver that does encrypted DNS through other means).
I also really like using the side panel to put my wiki sites and dictionaries in. I’ve only been using Zen for a week now and it seems to be my forever browser of choice.
Tab cram. If you have a lot of tabs horizontally, they shrink/scroll and you can’t read any captions on them, just icons in the best case. But having tabs vertically helps a lot.
Another reason would be that you can have tabs for your tabs, essentially. If you’ve used something like Sideberry for Firefox (my personal favourite), it has a workspace feature, which means that you can toggle between lists of tabs in your browser.
I’m not that bad of a tab hoarder, but vertical space matters much more than horizontal space, at least for my usage pattern, and having tabs on the side also helps.
BTW, Firefox Nightly have just landed native support for vertical tabs that can be toggled in about:config (for now). Set both sidebar.revamp and sidebar.verticalTabs to true in about:config and you’re golden.
Edit: my dumb ass referenced Zen browser’s vertical tabs under the post about the Zen browser’s vertical tabs