Right now is the best period of time yet for Firefox-based browser, especially when most alternative browsers are Chrome-based.
While there are a bunch of forks like Librewolf and Palemoon, they provide features mainly for power users like hardened privacy and tweaked user-prefs. A year ago the only fork I knew of, based on recent stable versions of Firefox and added productivity features on top was Floorp. I was very surprised at the hype and sudden popularity of Zen Browser in the past few months and have been curious why it grew so much faster than Floorp which has been around for much longer, look at the Github star graph: https://star-history.com/#zen-browser%2Fdesktop=&Date=. Zen Browser currently has 19.3K stars while Floorp has 6.1K.
Reasons I can think of are the following: heavy promotion of the browser by the devs and community on places like Reddit along with emphasizing its ‘zen’ philosophy, really fast development (it now has way more features than Floorp), and the Zen mods store, where you can install CSS mods.
What are your thoughts and reasons for Zen Browser becoming so popular so fast? (while its not mainstream, it did grow fast in among Firefox and power users)
Zen doesn’t even support passkeys properly. I stopped using it almost immediately after trying it. I attribute it to good marketing and PR as an Arc alternative. Especially after Arc showed their hand very clearly regarding how they’d respond to Manifest v3 and then the recent security fiasco.
When everyone is in the market for a new Browser and you’re selling new ideas, you’ll find a lot of buyers. Hopefully from the ashes of Firefox someone comes out on top though. For now I’ll keep using my customized FF for everything, but I imagine that will have to change in the not too distant future.
As for Arc, I have heard so much praise for it as if it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.
I would never use it as a personal browser, mostly because I really only keep 2-5 tabs open at a time for personal stuff. However, Arc has been an absolute game changer for work. Just a couple of reasons:
- The way it blend tabs and favorites prevents you from accidentally having multiple tabs of the same site open (though you still can have multiple when you want)
- Workspaces have very little friction to them, and you can control whether they are sandboxed or not, which helps greatly manage my “hats” at work
- Lots of smart keyboard shortcut options make zipping through common tasks a breeze
- Their “Tidy Tabs” button uses an LLM to group similar tabs together, which is a lifesaver during big research sessions
I hope their monitization plans succeed, because I’d hate to see this browser die.
