Hacker Remix

Zen: Firefox Based Browser

72 points by Palmik 5 days ago | 42 comments

imiric 5 days ago

I've been pretty happy with LibreWolf for a few months now, which has similar goals, but delivered in a less flashy package. My first instinct is to distrust this based on the flashiness alone.

For someone who's tried both: any reasons I should consider switching or not?

According to [this page][1] Zen is slightly faster than LibreWolf. But honestly, performance has been acceptable for me, so it's not something that would compel me to switch.

[1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/benchmarks

ranguna 5 days ago

Looking at Zen's landing page, Zen seems to have more of a focus on visual customization, whilst Librewolf is just Firefox with better privacy.

Personally I've never felt the need to customise the visuals of Firefox, so I'll stick with Librewolf.

mossTechnician 5 days ago

Zen has an interesting privacy policy, saying they don't intentionally collect any data, but they also say:

> We try to disable all telemetry data collection in Zen Browser. But, we may have missed some. Check the below links for more information.

https://zen-browser.app/privacy-policy

dartharva 5 days ago

This seems to be meant as a Firefox-based alternative to Vivaldi and Arc (https://arc.net/). LibreWolf doesn't have similar goals.

akimbostrawman 5 days ago

Connects (at least) to:

- aus5.mozilla.org

- firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com

- location.services.mozilla.com

- push.services.mozilla.com

- redirector.gvt1.com

- s2.googleusercontent.com

- services.addons.mozilla.org

- support.mozilla.org

- zen-browser.app

Why even bother with this instead of just Firefox or an actual private fork like LibreWolf...

trallnag 5 days ago

There are other reasons beyond privacy to use forks. For example I'm currently trying out Floorp, mainly due to the support of PWAs and better integration of vertical tabs with Sidebery. No CSS required to make the horizontal bar disappear

ivanmontillam 5 days ago

I may burn a lot of reputation with my comment ahead, but: I'm a bit tired of privacy-focused web browsers. As you just said, it's not the only use case there is.

What's the differentiation among all of these smaller niche browsers? Can't we escape sameness?

More context: It's not that I don't care about privacy, I do. I'm just fine with some defaults. I don't need (or want) something like Tails. There's some level of privacy that becomes unwieldy to manage.

rakoo 5 days ago

There's a big difference with a full distribution like Tails and using a private-by-default browser like Librewolf.

subsection1h 5 days ago

> No CSS required to make the horizontal bar disappear

It's literally one line in userChrome.css:

  #TabsToolbar { display: none }

Is one line in userChrome.css worse than one line in user.js (where other Firefox customizations are made)?

pvg 5 days ago

Big recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303974

jhickok 5 days ago

I've been using Zen for around 2 months now as I mentally prepare to leave Google Chrome, and I have been pleasantly surprised. A few annoyances:

* there are bugs-- for example, I have been unable to launch Zen and I just get the bouncy icon on my macos task bar.

* when using the minimal tab view on the left hand pane, you cannot easily close tabs on a laptop because there is no "X" on hover-over

* for some reason youtube is less reactive than chrome. when I watch YT vids I frequently tap the right arrow key to skip ahead a few seconds, and there is a noticeable delay between zen and chrome. For now, I continue to use Chrome for YT videos.

acheong08 5 days ago

YouTube in general performs worse on Firefox. My solution thus far has been to use alternative front ends (I host my own invidious instance).

jhickok 5 days ago

Thanks, I am definitely going to look into this.