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.
what's up with vertical tabs? it seems very foreign to me having always used horizontal ones. is there any particular benefit beyond it just feeling better for some people?
also off-topic but I've heard that Privacy Badger is largely made redundant by uBlock Origin and can actually make your browser more easily fingerprinted
It is a shock for sure when I first used it, but you get used to it since the vertical tabbing is integrated with the Zen workflow (split view, side panels). It also frees up some space for navigation since you're able to collapse it.
Interesting, I might have to look into this later
This actually applies to ClearURLs as well, there's another URL tracking blocklist that can be added to uBlock Origin by adding the URL to the custom filters list.
Vertical tabs let you see more of a tab's name while still displaying at least as many of them. (The downside is that they can only do this because they take up more screen space)
I've always hated horizontal tabs. It's one of the reasons why I started using Firefox way back in like 2006 because there's a popular extension that gave you vertical tabs. Horizontal tabs suck once you have 10+ tabs open and I have 70+ tabs lol
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