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there's a new "zen" Firefox fork on the block focused on theming and has some features from Edge, all licensed under MPL (www.zen-browser.app)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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plus the usual betterfox

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

New Firefox forks are quite interesting. I've tried it, these are my impressions so far:

The UI looks a little bit too much like a generic electron app to me, there is no option for native GTK or QT theming.
It seems they ship version that use the newer CPU instructions to optimize the application, I'm not sure standard Firefox does. This is neat. It does feel a bit faster but I'm unsure whether this is because of optimizations or because I have 100x as many tabs open on vanilla Firefox right now.
The vertical tabs are very nice. I currently use the "Tree Style Tab" extension and some hacky CSS scripts for that, and this seems like it would work a lot better.
The shortcuts are off by default, which is nice, but still seem to be the same as Firefox.
It feels a bit buggy. I had to restart the application to be able to load a site.
They kept Firefox sync, which I like.
You can choose between dark and light mode on the first startup, but I haven't been able to find the setting again.

Conclusion Overall, a decent Firefox rebrand. Better tab management, split windows, and workspaces seem quite nice. I would probably consider using it if it put the settings in 1 place and didn't have any bugs.