I tried the Zen browser

In the recent uproar about Firefox’s ToS changes the Zen browser was mentioned regularly. So I decided to try it out.

my existing daily driver

95% of the time I am using the Firefox extended support release as packaged in the Debian Stable repos.

• Vertical Tabs Reloaded extension
• uBlock Origin
• userChrome.css workarounds to hide the top (built-in) tab bar

zen

I downloaded the latest AppImage for Linux and installed it. The 107MB dl was a bit bigger than the .deb, but I guess that’s to be expected with containerized images.

First run required looking at several slides about the project, with no apparent way to skip. The import function only saw Chromium and would not import from the existing FF profile. I had to manually export bookmarks and passwords from FF for import into zen.

I do like the UI; it is quite close to my FF setup but

The custom search shortcuts are Chrome-style, which I dislike intensely. After importing my bookmarks from FF I found that zen does use bookmark-based shortcuts.

The extension I interact with most is uBlock Origin. At each start Zen hides the extension icon and I have to stop/restart the extension to get it to show up again for that session.

The browser crashed on me about 1x/day.

conclusion

I slightly prefer the zen UI but not enough to overcome the annoyances. I’ll check back on the project next year if it’s still active.