[HN Gopher] Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Fir...
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Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
Author : femou
Score : 700 points
Date : 2024-08-20 20:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zen-browser.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zen-browser.app)
| gsimons88 wrote:
| Does anybody have insight into how this compares to Brave? In
| their own comparison Brave is not even considerd.
| Kokouane wrote:
| They only compared to Firefox-based browsers which does make
| sense. Most people are already firmly on one side of the
| Chromium vs FF engine debate.
|
| Compared to Brave in what terms? Speed, not sure, but Chromium
| is known to be better. As far as I know, Brave doesn't allow
| split tabs or workspaces though.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Brave now has split tabs in the latest nightly iirc.
|
| Not sure about workspaces, is it like profiles?
| Perz1val wrote:
| Seems like workspaces are just a different UI for tab
| grouping, some ppl may prefer it. For me both are usable,
| but both are just a partial remedy for people that keep too
| much tabs opened
| mrweasel wrote:
| > In their own comparison Brave is not even considerd
|
| If their target audience is disgruntled Firefox users that
| makes a ton of sense. I would not consider replacing Firefox
| with a browser based on Chrome/Chromium. It's not that I think
| it a bad rendering engine, it not, but I don't like the mono-
| culture that has been promoted and would like to avoid
| contributing to it, if I can.
| netbioserror wrote:
| I still don't understand this "browser engine monopoly"
| argument. Engines are the most difficult part to build and
| coordinate around. WebKit is open source and gets
| contributions from across the industry. It would make sense
| for most people to coalesce around that single target. The
| browsers built around the engine are the feature-filled
| interfaces people care about and where competition should
| happen. The engine has no opinions about tracking or tabs or
| built-in services. As soon as we argue we need unique
| engines, there are now multiple competing standards for
| developers to target. In fact, I'd bet that future engines
| that cite issues with WebKit as their motivation for a fork
| or a from-scratch rewrite will start using the tagline
| "WebKit-compatible" because that standard is so important.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| The issue with a single browser having dominance is that
| the largest contributor to that project doesn't just
| control the project, they control the Web.
| a2128 wrote:
| It's sad they don't link it clearly but it's available on Flathub
| if you're on Linux:
| https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.zen_browser.zen
| redkoala wrote:
| Vertical tabs and privacy focused implementation gives me a good
| combination between the Arc browsing experience and the privacy
| protections that Mullvad browser (or private mode Firefox)
| deliver.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Yeah I'm keen to try Zen to see if they've nailed the
| tab/workspace UX in the way that Arc has. I don't like Arc's
| decline into slow AI features and growth hacks, but some of the
| core functionality is really nice.
| willi59549879 wrote:
| I was very surprised with selection if the search engine after
| install. None of the browsers I tried do that. I quite like the
| vertical tabs also the browser is visually appealing
| commercialnix wrote:
| I use Sway (an i3 clone for Wayland), so these "split views" and
| "workspaces" are not appealing to me.
|
| Zen makes serious claims about performance and sandboxing, but do
| not forwardly present writings on how they do these things,
| leaving us with the impression there are some tweaks here and
| there but not much more.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'm a Sway user as well but I still find value in features like
| workspaces, tabs, and split views in certain apps even though
| they are all also features in Sway. Sometimes a particular
| split (or any of those other things) can itself be a context I
| want to switch to in part of my current view. Rather than
| individually orchestrate that from wherever the components are
| into my current view it can be nice to define that relation
| more directly via something like this.
|
| Not saying such features in apps must also be appealing to you
| as well or anything equally silly, just whether or not they are
| appealing is more hinged on that base question of whether you
| like the idea of nested organizational structures than whether
| or not your window manager has a similar tiling feature.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I've been using the sway family of window managers for nearly
| 20 years! (First ion2, then ion3, then i3, and now sway.) In
| all this time I've briefly used native tabs but mostly now use
| windows without title bars or any other decorations in split
| mode all of the time. Most of the day I simply have a terminal
| running tmux on the first workspace with vim in the first tmux
| window, shells in the others, and a browser on the second sway
| workspace.
|
| Would I benefit from using native windows in sway? It often
| feels like vim splitting, tmux splitting, Firefox tabs, and
| sway windows are all fighting with against other or at the very
| least not cooperating when they could be doing a better job if
| they all deferred to sway. I'm just not sure how to do that
| well with easy switching between windows and I don't know if
| vim even supports it at all unless I use gvim?
| commercialnix wrote:
| I feel like you and I would be friends.
| granra wrote:
| I used to also use i3 and later sway and I noticed I only
| ever tiled my terminals. I don't really remember why but I
| started using tmux (with tilish) and I liked that I can
| detach and reattach to sessions later. But at that point I'm
| just full screening windows so now I'm on gnome and use a
| single terminal window with tmux :)
|
| Edit: my journey of text editors has been vim -> neovim ->
| helix so I just have them open inside the tmux sessions.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Another part of my journey is moving to entirely local
| development rather than ssh-ing from a $2000 MacBook
| (running a Linux virtual machine) to a $5000 dev server. I
| now use native Linux on a $250 mini PC to write my glue
| code and k8s to hand off all my big compute tasks.
|
| But what that really means is, while ssh-tmux-vim is great
| when you need it, local UIs could be so much richer, and I
| would never know because I am still tied to using my local
| machine as if it were a remote host.
|
| I should stop writing about it and just do something. I
| have a feeling that using native sway tabs for _everything_
| might be fantastic, if I can get over the hump of making
| the change.
| dotancohen wrote:
| As a very longtime VIM user, can you talk me into helix?
| granra wrote:
| I'm not one for preaching about software :p
|
| I thought I'd miss the infinite extendability of neovim
| with all my plugins and such but it didn't end up
| mattering to me and it was quite freeing actually to be
| just bound to what is supported in the core editor (as
| long as it's enough for you). I've been waiting for
| editorconfig support since before switching but it
| doesn't look like it will be merged into core.
|
| Afaik there's plans to add plugin support using some
| custom lisp language which I'm excited about (I wrote all
| my neovim config in fennel).
|
| But overall it's really fast and comes with essentials
| built-in like LSP and tree sitter support. There's some
| learning curve coming from vim in terms of key commands
| and such as helix is inspired by kakoune in that realm.
|
| I don't think I did a really good job at convincing you
| but that's what came from my head quickly :D
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thanks you! I will take a look. I waited very long to
| jump to neovim.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Tmux splits are really nice on the server, and getting the
| server and my local system to be aware of each other is...
| either very difficult or impossible.
|
| Tmux and vim splits, the competition between them can be a
| little annoying. Mostly I prefer tmux splits, but the shared
| yank buffers and ability to link scrolling in vim is really
| nice.
|
| You can open a terminal in vim somehow IIRC, maybe vim as a
| multiplexer is the way to true enlightenment, haha.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| Could you provide some screenshots? I'd love to see what your
| desktop looks like with this configuration.
| boesboes wrote:
| No need to be so snarky.
| gpvos wrote:
| What's snarky about that?
| sirodoht wrote:
| macOS says ""Zen Browser.app" is damaged and can't be opened. You
| should move it to the Bin." :(
| weikju wrote:
| Probably isn't notarized. Right-click the app and open, or use
| the terminal:
|
| xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/app
|
| edit: turns out they are describing this process here from a
| link on the macos download page:
|
| https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
| danpalmer wrote:
| The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems
| superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately,
| perhaps it needs a better title.
|
| Also while I understand some people have moral objections to
| the 100 dollar/euro registration fee, clearly a lot more than
| that has been spent in time to get the application to this
| stage, almost all apps for macOS distributing like this are
| notarized now, and with such a slick marketing page it just
| feels weird to then not spend a relatively small amount of
| money to make this immediately far more accessible. The
| instructions aren't hard to follow, but still make trying it
| out 10-100x harder.
|
| Also it's tricky to get donations for something that
| literally prevents people using the application, no one is
| going to donate for the registration fee before even trying
| it, and once they've gotten through the installation process
| there's no incentive to donate for that anymore.
| tadfisher wrote:
| To be fair, requiring the developer 100/eur per year in
| perpetuity to avoid a dialog literally telling the user to
| drag the app into the Trash feels a lot like extortion.
| zamadatix wrote:
| At this point the browser isn't even beta on a single
| platform, I don't think making it easy to install on macOS
| is really a pressing priority to expect developers to drop
| money on in hopes of growth quite yet.
| devjab wrote:
| I don't think anyone should pay Apple to notarize their
| applications to be honest. It's basically extortion that
| you need both a running $99 subscription and a MacBook of
| some sort to complete the process. I understand why big
| companies will do so, but for OSS projects it frankly
| should cost anything. I do wonder if the process would
| stick if companies like Google and Microsoft refused to do
| it though they obviously won't.
|
| That being said, I'm sure a lot of OSS projects are willing
| to accept it if you personally chose to pay the fee.
| weikju wrote:
| > The link is titled "Download Zen for macOS" which seems
| superfluous when the DMG starts downloading immediately,
| perhaps it needs a better title.
|
| yes I found that awkward as well
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I'll pay it when they just fully block software that
| doesn't pay.
|
| Until then as they escalate their extortion dialogs I'll
| just normalize instructions on how to run dodgy looking
| shell scripts that bypass them on software I release for
| free.
| rchaud wrote:
| If you are downloading a new browser app in 2024, it's a
| fair bet that you know how to get around MacOS' nanny state
| policies around un-notarized apps.
| 0x2a wrote:
| Looks like it supports Firefox extensions such as uBlock Origin
| as well. Surprised the website didn't mention it.
|
| Wonder if this still applies:
|
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
| rocketvole wrote:
| I mean, it's a firefox-based browser. Is there any reason why
| it wouldn't support firefox extensions?
| 0x2a wrote:
| I thought it might be similar to Orion based on the
| submission title, but it looks like a rebranded Firefox
| (which is great). This is what Mozilla should be doing.
| hysan wrote:
| Seems... quite lacking in details? It makes some pretty bold
| claims but doesn't explain how it achieves things like better
| performance. Their docs are also pretty empty.
| dao- wrote:
| Here are Firefox about:config preferences they tweak for
| performance:
|
| https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
|
| I also found this somewhat funny: # Edit: ok,
| ill remove it, goodbye top #1 on fastest browsers benchmark :[
| # ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries
|
| https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
| dnpls wrote:
| The website is so bare, I'd like to see a list with all the
| major features and some screenshots before downloading
| anything.
| bityard wrote:
| Seems like the features they promote on the marketing page are
| ones that Vivaldi has had for quite some time. I'll probably give
| it a try but when I gave up on Firefox, one of the main reasons
| was that many of the sites I visit aren't tested on Firefox due
| to the low market share and are broken in subtle ways.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Like what? Aside from google and Apple being actively hostile
| to Firefox I rarely have issues
| Yeri wrote:
| 100% and if I have issues it's an extension (like ublock or
| privacy badger)
| dimator wrote:
| These two are the culprits every time a page has issues on
| Firefox for me.
| bpbp-mango wrote:
| Split tab is cool. Couldn't import data from firefox. Quite slow
| to launch. Profiles are buggy, the name gets lost and it keeps
| launching the welcome wizard.
|
| looking forward to seeing this mature
| riperoni wrote:
| Firefox with some extras might he nice, but the structure of that
| web page raises the question:
|
| Who is the target audience? That website has so many
| oversimplified marketing claims that are about security and
| customization. It seems wholly undecided if the target audience
| is people who fall for buzz words or someone actually interested
| in quantitative improvements over Firefox.
|
| And yet the comparison is just checkboxes and not even including
| base Firefox. How about bar graphs for comparison and some actual
| pictures of the advertised customization, layout and workspaces?
|
| To me this still feels a little shady, even though the features
| seem nice.
| jszymborski wrote:
| This website mentions LibreWolf which I've recently switched to.
| It's truly great. Takes care of all the decrapification I do to a
| fresh FF install while keeping up with the upstream security
| updates. Feels like how FF should feel imho.
| dartharva wrote:
| I don't know why but websites always feel downgraded with Firefox
| and its descendants. Long load times, incomplete/failed loads,
| bad font rendering, buffering.. It feels evident that webmasters
| only care for compatibility with Chrome et al.
|
| It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again
| started breaking on it nowadays.
| winter_blue wrote:
| I use Firefox a lot (and occasionally Chrome), and I haven't
| had any issues with Firefox. I've been pretty happy with it.
| frosting1337 wrote:
| While I agree that develops really only care for Chromium
| compatability, I've not really noticed any issues with Firefox,
| except with Google sites every now and then (YouTube in
| particular).
| dartharva wrote:
| Yes, Youtube is the main irritant for me as well.
| mariusor wrote:
| When it comes to the websites belonging to the competition,
| I feel like it's unjust to blame Firefox instead of, in
| this case, Google.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Weirdly, I've had to install the full Google Chrome because
| the Chromium has been problematic. Can't remember details,
| but I think MS Teams was one example.
| jmprspret wrote:
| Fonts do always look way better on Chrome. I can't explain it.
| widdershins wrote:
| It's just familiarity. I use Firefox on macOS and I always
| think the fonts look fuzzy on Chrome when I'm occasionally
| forced to use it. I spent a few weeks on Arc (Chrome-based)
| earlier this year, got used to the fonts, and then they
| looked a bit weird when I came back to Firefox.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| +1
|
| I hate the Chrome fonts for this reason.
|
| I'm surprised Mac users are noticing a difference though, I
| find the difference basically vanishes on really high res
| displays (like my QHD-ish panel on my Framework 13).
| pjerem wrote:
| Pixels aren't noticeable anymore in such resolutions but
| font rendering and anti aliasing may still impact
| perceived contrast and crispness.
|
| Though, on such displays, disabling AA totally is a
| viable option but it will still feel different.
| pjerem wrote:
| Interesting, font rendering is the number one thing that
| makes me hate Electron apps (I have so much more reasons to
| hate Chrome).
|
| It's to the point that I just can't use, say, VS Code on a
| monitor that is not Hi-DPI.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the font doesn't look
| better. Maybe it's aesthetically more pleasing but to me,
| it's just harder to read.
|
| I have multiple eye issues that may not help and which make
| me more demanding but since I don't have this issue with OS
| rendered fonts, I consider this to be an issue.
| exusn wrote:
| Font rendering does feel much worse on macOS, but on Windows
| you can tweak the cleartype parameters a bit and get it closer
| to Edge/Chrome.
|
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/404408660a4d976e2a...
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I use Firefox on Linux and in general it's fine. Only really
| dreadful stuff like Microsoft Teams will outright fail. I've
| found that using NextDNS or an adblocker is more harmful on
| certain sites. I've had situations where a website completely
| fails until I change my DNS provider to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or
| wherever. But I tend to avoid sites like that if I have a
| choice.
|
| I'm sticking with Firefox. I like the account features (sync,
| send tab to another device etc) but Firefox's killer feature is
| container tabs, especially with the add-on for regex URL
| matching for container selection, and the other add-on that
| automatically handles AWS SSO accounts.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| I noticed Teams unexpectedly started working in Firefox for
| me, a few months ago.
| tux3 wrote:
| That's terrible. Maybe if you downgrade?
| xolve wrote:
| > especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for
| container selection
|
| Which add-on is that? It would be quite helpful.
| alje wrote:
| That is a built-in Firefox container feature. Open a
| website in a container and then click on the container icon
| (right next to the search bar) to keep that site open in
| that container. Every other time, that site loads directly
| into that container
| xolve wrote:
| Thats per domain, not on any pattern of URL.
| avazhi wrote:
| Well at this point for anybody who cares about adblocking
| Firefox is the only choice, unfortunately.
| justinclift wrote:
| Have you seen the thing were Mozilla officially bought an
| advertising company recently then started adding advertising
| friendly features near silently?
| grounder wrote:
| Can you provide more info about this?
| justinclift wrote:
| Yep:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40842808
| Kokouane wrote:
| Also important note, but Firefox account settings/sync is
| End-to-End encrypted, a nice privacy feature compared to the
| much more invasive Google Account sync.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That might be dependent on use case and which sites you use. I
| haven't installed Chrome for more than 3 years. Firefox has
| been my primary browser ever since Opera switched from using
| Presto, but I kept Chrome as a backup for the longest time. Now
| I don't needed it anymore. I do have Safari available, but
| that's mostly for testing.
|
| When your coming directly from Chrome, then maybe you see the
| problems more? I know I started really disliking Chrome, mostly
| do to the UI and the developer tools (which is worse that
| Firefox and much worse than the old Opera, in my opinion).
| Zyten wrote:
| I had the most issues with sites like YouTube, where I'm not
| surprised that Chrome based browsers run better. However, I
| recently also had issues with Sony, where the login page would
| error out every single time with Safari and Firefox. Chromium
| worked just fine.
|
| I honestly do not understand why there's this little testing
| being done. Yeah, Chrome is dominant, but that doesn't mean
| that other browsers should not be used or don't exist. It's
| actively harming users. In our software development projects
| (HPC software), we deliberately test with all compilers
| available on HPC systems, just to ensure that nothing breaks...
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| As web developers it is our moral and ethical duty to use
| Firefox / any non chromium browsers because we truly understand
| the problem of one company controlling the web.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Same problem, to the point that I started testing alternative
| browsers that are chromium based. Currently using Brave, I
| couldn't find better alternatives that worked on linux, windows
| and Android.
|
| It's shocking that there isn't a decent chromium based browser
| that supports extensions on android.
| Kokouane wrote:
| There is an app called Kiwi Browser that does support
| extensions on Android. The issue becomes no sync, which I
| think is also a feature you are looking for.
|
| It makes sense that Chrome has never built it, have to keep
| the users from using Adblock.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I'm aware of Kiwi, but it lags for months to a year behind
| chromium updates, which is very dangerous.
|
| Chrome for sure, I was surprised that also any other
| browser (Via, Soul, Brave, vivaldi) don't support
| extensions.
|
| I'm on Brave now because while it does not support ublock
| origin, the adblocker is stronger than the others I tried
| and works similarly. It also has some sort of builtin
| sponsorblock, so I use it on the phone over Firefox which
| is slow.
| christophilus wrote:
| Slack video chat works only in Chrome. As in, they explicitly
| check for non-Chrome browsers and say "Nope. We won't even let
| you try".
|
| When I saw that, I thought, "Yep. We've come full-circle."
| Chrome really is the new IE.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| When a site doesn't work properly, please use this form to
| notify Mozilla: https://webcompat.com/issues/new
| willi59549879 wrote:
| I quite like the zen browser. It is privacy focused but also
| visually appealing. The feature that I like best, is that the
| browser does not take up a lot of space for itself. Even the top
| bar can be hidden. That way most of the screen is there to show
| the website.
| wmstack wrote:
| This is the information I was looking for. Does it have the Arc
| style search box/dialog/palette that pops up when you need it?
| willi59549879 wrote:
| there is no search button. but you can search in the url bar,
| which will show you a button to switch to the corresponding
| tab
| bionsystem wrote:
| All of those are features I love in Vivaldi. If it matures it
| will be a very welcome open source replacement.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| I use Vivaldi too. Will try this one out to see how it compared
| to Firefox
| aezart wrote:
| I've been looking for a Vivaldi replacement as well, due to the
| looming manifest v3 stuff. Hopefully this, or another project
| like it, works out.
| nxtcoder17 wrote:
| how is it different than [floorp](https://floorp.app/en) ?
| stackghost wrote:
| I suppose it doesn't have a name I'd be embarrassed to tell my
| grandmother about.
| latexr wrote:
| Every time I see a question like this on HN, the answer can be
| found out with minimal effort. If you want to recommend some
| relevant alternative you use, just be honest and say that. If
| you really want to know, it would be reasonable to spend twenty
| seconds on the page, there's a comparison table.
| nusl wrote:
| You can determine this yourself quite quickly by visiting each
| site and comparing them.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsm9lu/im_doing_a...
|
| Reddit launch of the project about 4 months ago.
|
| Fantastic project and already very polished browser. Really
| enjoying it!
| Mashimo wrote:
| > Optimized for peak performance
|
| What does that even mean?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I interpret that as they have tweaked the configurations with
| the performance in mind, meaning their goal when customizing
| the browser has been to get as much juice as possible out of
| the browser.
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| Realistically, compiler flags and config flags have had
| diminishing returns on Firefox builds for a few years now.
| Mozilla are very quick to update the toolchain now, compared
| to before as well as taking care of curated CPU-dispatch
| where necessary.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| Does anyone know if Zen identifies itself as 'Firefox' at
| program-level when running on Windows? This is the biggest
| mistake that FF forks and offshoots make, since it makes it
| impossible to run Firefox and the derivative work at the same
| time.
| jeremiahlee wrote:
| Just tested with Zen v1.0.0-a.26. User agent reports:
| Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0)
| Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
|
| Exact match with Firefox v129.0.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh;
| Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| He's not asking about the User-Agent string sent to websites.
|
| He's asking about how the browser identifies itself to the
| Windows operating system. According to him, other forks say
| simply "Firefox," which makes it impossible to run them
| alongside the official Firefox release.
| autoexec wrote:
| Shouldn't be a problem if you use the portable version of one
| (or even both if that's an option).
| widdershins wrote:
| Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I
| will write one.
|
| I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc
| primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI
| that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really
| got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them
| come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up!
|
| My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about
| performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's
| different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact:
| it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's
| great.
| dao- wrote:
| Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm
| generally happy to see this.
|
| I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what
| their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to
| fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
|
| For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have
| implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has
| been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I
| wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've
| released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost
| efficient.
|
| Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they
| seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not
| there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing
| them may come with a tradeoff.
| nokeya wrote:
| Tab groups again? I don't remember when exactly, but like 10
| years ago Firefox already had this feature. I was using them
| happily, organising all my numerous tabs to a dozen of groups
| by theme (work, social, movies, etc). But then Mozilla
| decided: "Nobody is using tab groups, screw it!" and removed
| them. All groups and tabs were lost. Now history will repeat?
| dao- wrote:
| I remember, I was around back then. :) Panorama was in some
| ways ahead of its time. The UI was nice visually but also
| somewhat heavy handed / not very beginner friendly to say
| the least, which contributed to it being used only by a
| relatively small share of our user base.
|
| We're cautious about not repeating history. We're
| implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the
| tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View)
| may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
| nokeya wrote:
| It was used by advanced users. And what advanced users
| do? Disable telemetry;) So, I suppose the share was a
| little bigger but not that much.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Maybe instead of ubiquitous stupidity-tqxax telemetry we
| could have some neo-Nielsen families and get to pick a
| roughly representative sample out of voluntary,
| compensated users. A trusted third party contracts the
| victims and agregates the data. Don't ask me who
| regulates or pays though.
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| > A trusted third party
|
| And why wouldn't it be Nielsen :) I remember when they
| sent me cash in the mail as a kid, fun times.
| cbsks wrote:
| They still do that. Just a few weeks ago my daughter
| filled out their survey and got $5!
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| That's so cool, mine was about 30 years ago. I had no
| idea they were still doing this!
| eddyg wrote:
| Or, just don't disable (anonymous) _metrics_.
|
| There's a BIG difference between _tracking_ and _metrics_
| , but they are often treated the same, especially by
| "power users".
| titusjohnson wrote:
| There's no difference between tracking and metrics,
| they're the same thing. You get your metrics out of the
| data you track. Browser phone home? Tracking.
|
| And there's no way for a user to validate that any
| tracking is indeed anonymous. The technical level needed
| to asses this is just... out of reach for everyone (the
| quantity of people who can properly verify this is small
| enough we can safely ignore it when speaking generally
| and use the coloquialism Everyone)
| LtdJorge wrote:
| I explicitly enable it
| justinclift wrote:
| > which contributed to it being used only by a relatively
| small share of our user base.
|
| And that's why telemetry is such a brain dead idea.
| People then actually make decisions based upon "number of
| people using feature X" which is incredibly... lets just
| say "unwise".
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| wonder if we should just accept it as "voting" and
| monitor their telemetry experiment and spam the option we
| would like
| justinclift wrote:
| Might be more accurate. ;)
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| You can vote for features on Mozilla Connect:
| https://connect.mozilla.org/
| Vinnl wrote:
| I think you're referring to Panorama View [1], introduced
| in Firefox 4 (2010). I think there are still extensions
| that replicate the experience [2].
|
| There are many things different now that might make it work
| better this time. If not just that it's 14 years later,
| different UI, and the pattern being familiar from other
| browsers, might make a difference too. But no guarantees,
| of course.
|
| (Note: I don't work on Tab Groups.)
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110613070035/http://www.a
| zaras...
|
| [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-
| groups/ is widely used, but I'm not sure if it does the
| overview. Other extensions do.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| There's also
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509350
| filed in 2018 for restoring it, now duped against this
| official bug...
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907090
| cxr wrote:
| Panorama from Firefox 4. Also called Tab Groups.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get
| above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong
| with bookmarks?
| KingMob wrote:
| Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so
| there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark.
| (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to
| bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?)
|
| But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the
| bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember
| the page title, but you can always scan through open
| tabs.
| torstenvl wrote:
| I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related
| tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete
| the whole folder or file it somewhere.
|
| I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
| miah_ wrote:
| I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with
| bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or
| forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices.
|
| Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to
| another Firefox on a different computer then use it there
| and decide it's fate.
| krferriter wrote:
| This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I
| would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at
| later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them
| from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at
| it later.
| proaralyst wrote:
| Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted
| hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a
| collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or
| closed together (specific API references that are
| normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to
| organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm
| working on.
|
| Both of these make context switching easier as I can
| quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using,
| knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In
| Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a
| bit of the persistence of bookmarks.
|
| I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm
| really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab
| groups
| slightwinder wrote:
| Bookmarks suck. They are slow and cumbersome to manage,
| especially when it's many related urls. And for working
| with them, I need to open them as a tab anyway, so why
| not stay there from the beginning?
| cxr wrote:
| I use Firefox's existing native support for tab groups
| that it's had since pre-1.0. They're called windows.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Cool until you restart your machine.
| cxr wrote:
| [delayed]
| PrototypeNM1 wrote:
| Think of it like memory hierarchies. Bookmarks are long
| term storage, tabs are registers. Tab groups fall
| somewhere in the middle, easy to reengage with and easy
| to put out of focus.
| superkuh wrote:
| Bookmarks don't have tab history.
| viraptor wrote:
| > I currently work on tab groups
|
| (It's happening.gif)
|
| But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the
| weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great.
| I'd love this to work in general and something with a
| persistent "current context" for new tabs.
| Vinnl wrote:
| If you're unfamiliar with Sidebery, it's similar to TST but
| has a neat tab groups feature as well.
|
| Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to
| Firefox - such as vertical tabs:
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-
| re...
| viraptor wrote:
| Thanks, sideberry looks great. I've defaulted to TST for
| so long, I haven't looked for alternatives, but it seems
| worth trying.
| BodyCulture wrote:
| Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some
| extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since
| many years and still today.
| mkesper wrote:
| Are you using the snap version? I don't doubt that will
| give a crappy experience.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| happens to me too. but i would bet money it's because of
| memory corruption in both of our cases.
|
| i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on
| non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the
| default) ram, one crash every couple weeks.
|
| so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non
| deterministic, it is ram corruption.
| BossingAround wrote:
| I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE
| Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had
| like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my
| work laptop unless I have to)
| codethief wrote:
| Does it freeze completely (forcing you to resort to kill
| -9) or is it just slow?
|
| In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and
| a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being
| a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing
| occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't
| had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever
| since.
| csouzaf wrote:
| I'm not sure how this contributes to the thread. This isn't
| a technical support forum, so it might not be the best
| place to discuss specific browser issues.
|
| I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first
| released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered
| some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're
| describing.
|
| Of course, browser performance can be affected by many
| factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might
| have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the
| official Firefox support channels.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| its good to see you giving direct feedback.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| Firefox defaults lately are awful and out of touch...
|
| gestures for reload/back/forward? really?
|
| several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a
| native feature? really?
|
| a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the
| author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs
| per window like everyone asked over the years?
|
| using on android? too bad now you don't have half the
| settings available, AND you will not access many extension
| for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a
| blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either!
|
| i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and
| have a list of settings (most not even available in the
| settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox
| every new install which is larger than my OS
| customizations.... and on android i did what anybself
| respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default.
| install F-DROID's instead.
|
| so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
| cma wrote:
| > several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin
| as a native feature? really?
|
| How much less will Google pay to be the default search if
| this is added?
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| but they will never say that out loud ;) so what is the
| official position? they don't even have one. nobody touch
| tickets mentioning these things. so sad how open source
| is so easily coopted.
|
| i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c
| misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin
| as a native feature? really?
|
| Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with
| a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the
| browser, they probably can work better.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Not just that, but why would Mozilla pick the winner
| here? Everyone complains about the side effects of
| default search engines, let's not do it again with ad-
| blockers!
|
| And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them
| from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| because that was the original promise with extensions!
| contribute without the red tape, and if enough people
| like it, we will incorporate.
|
| heck dev tools started as someone cloning IE dev tool as
| an extension... there were two... the IE clone and a
| dalvik debugger... mozilla had no problem picking the
| winer and incorporating in the official build.
|
| > their google contract
|
| stop normalizing this! they officially denie this
| arrangement exist! so they cannot use it as an excuse.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| the extension already incorporates a interface to
| select/finetune/update the rules.
|
| for the past decade updates to the extension itself have
| been UI only.
| yonrg wrote:
| I'm a firefox-only user, and I read your comment in two
| ways. It's grumpy, but also on the point! Thanks, I feel
| similarly. What is your main browser btw?
|
| FF works for me in great ways, and I am highly productive
| with it, as long as some plugins still work: uBlock,
| tridactyl, foxyproxy. And for UI: sidebery, stylus.
|
| From time to time I feel I should turn my back towards FF
| when they come up with new decisions in their UI, which I
| drastically reduce (no menu, no tabs,...), or new features,
| which are more disturbing than helping.
|
| On android, I discovered 'kiwi browser' which is FF based
| but does not blacklist the plugins.
| mnmalst wrote:
| Man you got my hopes up for a bit there since I
| remembered Kiwi browser was chromium based which after
| checking, it still is. From there website: "Kiwi is based
| on Chromium and WebKit." https://kiwibrowser.com/
| Vinnl wrote:
| Note that Firefox for Android no longer explicitly
| allowlists extensions: anyone can write one that anyone
| can install.
| downsplat wrote:
| For Android, I've been using Firefox Beta as my daily
| driver for over a year, it works flawlessly, and
| about:config is available.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| yeah, even the very own devs HATE the defaults someone
| (who?) decided for android.
|
| first there was a non documented setting to remove the
| blacklist for extensions... when they blocked access to
| about:config then everyone started using firefox dev...
| now they removed the block from nightly (i guess using
| real bleeding edge dev annoyed them)...
|
| anyway, this only proves me point even harder.
| autoexec wrote:
| They've automatically added spying by default now too.
| Mozilla is now an ad-tech company. Don't expect defaults to
| get any better.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| Glad to hear Mozilla is working on adding this. I switched to
| a chrome-based browser for a while and the only thing I miss
| after going back to Firefox is tab groups.
| Croftengea wrote:
| Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer
| feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters.
| Will the vanilla implementation support it?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| What is the hold up on adding Chrome like tab groups with
| colours and ability to collapse them?
| espadrine wrote:
| Product presentation is a hard-to-develop skill. I agree that
| many aspects of the page are muddy.
|
| I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever
| seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz To
| access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type
| Ctrl+L. For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type
| Ctrl+1, 2... or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through.
|
| I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Sideberry extension does this perfectly. I migrated from
| Vivaldi to Firefox because of it.
| prometheon1 wrote:
| Same! I switched back from Brave to Firefox last year after
| discovering that Sidebery has tab panels (which I think Arc
| calls workspaces) that can be set to use the same Firefox
| container. I want to be logged into different accounts of the
| same service, in Brave I had different "profiles" for this,
| but I like that now in Firefox I can have everything in a
| single window and I can easily switch between containers by
| switching to a different panel. (Which I have a hotkey for)
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I might be willing to try it because of these workspaces.
|
| How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| With workspaces, I can choose a different workspace (on my
| Mac) with a right/left swipe of my mouse in the vertical tabs
| column. It's mind blowingly more productive.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Tried Arc and didn't like it. It's main selling point is the
| workspaces. However, I'm not the type of person to have 200
| tabs open at once, so it wasn't as useful for me as I thought
| it would be. It's def a nice looking app though.
| angryasian wrote:
| You should try Firefox Mozilla containers
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
|
| This is official supported add-on
| mdaniel wrote:
| Along with the excellent "open in container" extension,
| allowing launching URLs into containers:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-
| in-c... $ firefox 'ext+container:name=HN&url=
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid=41311435'
| worble wrote:
| I'm curious what the use-case of this extension is? Other
| sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom
| protocol handler, and if it's just for my own browser then
| I'm going to be creating containers and then setting
| "always open site in this container" and Firefox will
| always open that site in a specific container. What are you
| using this for?
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this
| custom protocol handler
|
| I have my own xdg-open in the PATH which supersedes the
| /usr/bin one (I believe there actually is a plugin
| mechanism for xdg-open but I found it easier to just
| create my own binary than learn their tomfoolery), and
| with that in mind, I'm able to make any URL routing
| decisions I'd like via that
|
| > then setting "always open site in this container"
|
| ... which won't work for multi-tenant sites like
| console.aws.amazon.com or portal.azure.com which use
| cookies or other such nonsense to determine who you are
| currently logged in as. That's actually true of Google
| and Microsoft, too, although I have less day-to-day
| experience with that. I am, of course, aware of the user
| switcher built into both AWS and Azure consoles, but it's
| not the same as having a giant red themed container for
| production accounts versus green for QA ones
|
| As for your specific question, I also use aws-vault to
| cook federated login URLs for the console because my
| experience of working with AWS SSO and Okta is some ...
| it's a lot of clicking ... versus letting aws-vault build
| the federated signin URL and then launching it into the
| container named according to its AccountID (so it's easy
| to programatically dispatch them)
| czk wrote:
| This is the main reason I still use Firefox. Being able to
| have multiple color-coded containers for my different Azure
| roles at work, and being able to set a custom socks5 proxy on
| each container so I can route certain container tabs through
| a different VPN service.
| autoexec wrote:
| If they commit to keeping all Firefox's spying out of their
| Firefox-based browsing UI that's all I really need. Firefox was
| fine, it's just stopped working for its users and respecting
| their privacy.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| > _don 't advertise wooly claims about performance and
| security_
|
| And about privacy ...
| benreesman wrote:
| We don't need those investors: https://youtu.be/kKAue9DiHc0
| maelito wrote:
| Firefox's container addon is one of the features that make me
| love firefox. But they could be integrated better.
|
| I'll try Zen.
| ammar-DLL wrote:
| i wish if this made in gtk4 or qt6
| raghavbali wrote:
| the browser wars are heating up again! nice
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The browser window chrome[1] wars*
|
| 1:(As in the pre Chrome meaning of the word)
| ramon156 wrote:
| While I don't condone complaining for the sake of complaining, I
| really don't see why I would use this. Every argument feels very
| "floatey".
|
| When I think of browser devs, I don't think about _fancy_ UI, and
| blazingly fast speeds! I think about engineers who know what they
| 're talking about.
|
| I've never heard of floorp, and the arguments against librewolf
| are silly. On top of that, some of these "features" like themes,
| profile switching are already in FireFox. So again, why would I
| choose Zen?
|
| I don't see how this project adds any value to the very mature
| FF, it's just piggybacking imo.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Sometimes (not necessarily here) just a better UI for existing
| features is enough to make a project succeed.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| One relevant example being Firefox, which started in exactly
| that way. Hiding some features from the overly-featureful
| Mozilla and focusing on the basic user flow.
| Perz1val wrote:
| The whole thing looks like the "new month, new JS framework"
| situation
| tcsenpai wrote:
| I used Arc a lot back when I used MacOS. Was definitely a
| pleasing experience. I missed it a lot since I switched to
| Linux/Firefox. I just set up Zen with all my extensions and
| bookmarks, it behaves very well: let's see if it stands the trial
| of time, but very nice work. I like the UI
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Have you tried the Sideberry extension?
| tcsenpai wrote:
| Nope. I see it is a vertical tab extension: will try it!
| grumblepeet wrote:
| Sadly didnt run for me on Windows on this Arm laptop although in
| mitigation I didnt try that hard & was in a hurry. I might have
| another look at it later. Uninstalled for now.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Someone pointed out to me that you can set eBay as the default
| search engine. That seems like a weird option. There can't be
| many that primarily uses their browser to access eBay, though I
| wouldn't rule out that people with this preference exists.
| biugbkifcjk wrote:
| Maybe they get some royalties by having it as an option?
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Stock Firefox also allows setting Amazon and eBay as a default
| search engine, and I wonder if this is related to Amazon being
| a sponsored shortcut on the new tab page.
| autoexec wrote:
| I wish you could just set the default search engine to "none".
| I just disable it eventually anyway, but it still leaves a
| bunch of garbage behind, like having "Search <whatever> for
| <blah blah blah>" in the context menu.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I got a weird error when trying to run the app from within the
| .DMG on ARM Mac, in case anyone who can look into it is reading.
|
| It said "Zen Browser" is damaged and can't be opened, you should
| reject the disk image.
|
| edit: it's a known thing to do with Apples security, workarounds
| in step 3 here:
|
| https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/53
| SigmundurM wrote:
| Per their documentation [1], you have to bypass MacOS's
| gatekeeper.
|
| [1]: https://docs.zen-browser.app/guides/install-
| macos#step-3-byp...
| ulimn wrote:
| I hate this about MacOS. It happens seldom enough for me to
| forget about it and every time I have to search the web for the
| solution. Thanks for posting the steps.
| causal wrote:
| Reading the discussion, I see the developers intend to never
| sign their OSX package. This is a pretty big red flag for me,
| shows that the developer isn't really serious about supporting
| OSX.
|
| Too bad, I was excited by the idea, but this is just
| unprofessional and I really need to trust my browser.
| mariusor wrote:
| > this is just unprofessional
|
| Or they just prefer to not go out of their way to support the
| walled garden that is the Apple ecosystem. Principles beat
| professionalism any day for me.
| causal wrote:
| Then don't claim to support it
| mariusor wrote:
| How would you phrase "we have a version that runs on your
| platform" then?
| anon23432343 wrote:
| One thing almost all arc clones dont get right and I talked with
| other arc users about this is that arc when surfing has no ui
| besides the border no top bar not tabs you can hide everything if
| you want to.
|
| I downloaded Zen and what do i see a top bar which I can not hide
| or at least I can not find how to do it.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| Okay I found it but its wanky at best. how do i show the topbar
| once its gone?
|
| I get that this ia an alpha but yeah going back to arc feels
| much smoother
| Alifatisk wrote:
| First we got Floorp, now we got Zen. Love it! I hope they make it
| available through Chocolatey and Homebrew like Floorp.
|
| I really like that Zen offers two options, a setup wizard and a
| portable binary.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| Hmm, doesn't appeal to me. There is nothing over stock FF which I
| would consider important for me.
| thinker5555 wrote:
| I've seen the "workspaces" thing in a few different browsers now.
| I know Vivaldi and Arc have them, and it sounds like it's a
| separate thing from profiles, but I don't quite grok what the
| difference is between workspaces and profiles. Can anyone help
| enlighten me? If you use both workspaces and profiles, what do
| you do differently between them?
| _benj wrote:
| I use workspaces in Vivaldi and they are pretty much a set of
| tabs that I can switch as a set, but all under the same
| profile. As an example, in my dev workspace I have GitHub,
| localhost, and a few other things I might need. In another
| workspace in have Google calendar, Jira, gmail, etc... I can
| switch workspaces and it will switch all of the current tabs in
| my browser.
|
| But, I'm logged in, say, in the same GitHub or Google account
| across workspace.
|
| Profiles on the other hand (I've used those on Arc) change
| where you are logged in... so I can be logged in to my work
| gmail on one profile, and to my personal gmail on another.
|
| Personally I don't find profiles that useful just for the fact
| that I simply use different browsers for personal and work...
| but a use case for profiles is, for example, to be signed in as
| admin and user to your local dev web application and test
| things between the two just by changing tabs instead of having
| to logout and login
| protomolecule wrote:
| One might think of them as virtual desktops.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Could I think of profiles as virtual desktops too?
| lysp wrote:
| Different user logins
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| it's just a group of tabs. absolutely nothing else. profiles
| offer settings (proxy, etc) and state (cookies, etc) isolation.
|
| it's the same as opening a new window for me. meh.
| mthoms wrote:
| Arc spaces have transient and pinned tabs, which in turn can
| be organized as needed into folders. Some tabs are actually
| multi-tab (split screen). The folders themselves have a neat
| feature whereby active tabs can be shown while hiding
| inactive tabs located in the same folder. I can also switch
| to a specific space with a user defined hotkey, and customize
| the color of each workspace. Each workspace can have its own
| profile (and history) or you can share profiles between
| workspaces. You choose.
|
| None of those on their own are groundbreaking, but all
| together they make for a compelling differentiator (for me
| anyways, but I have ADHD so prioritize different things than
| most).
|
| Describing all that as "absolutely nothing [other than a new
| window]" is not accurate at all.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| thanks for the excellent description... but the question
| was how it's different from profiles, which is used for
| isolation and settings change. what you described is still
| nothing more than moving windows around.
| mthoms wrote:
| I don't know what to say to that. I just described 5 or
| so features that are objectively more than simply "moving
| windows around".
|
| Maybe it's because I wasn't clear that many of those
| features work on per workspace basis - transient tabs
| (unique to each workspace), unique folder organization
| features (customized for each workspace), built in split
| screen (again - with custom arrangements per workspace),
| hotkey switching between workspaces, different color
| theme per workspace (so it's easy to know which workspace
| I'm in, or select another window quickly with Mission
| Control).
|
| Then there's the fact that profiles are a separate thing
| from workspaces so you can mix and match profiles to
| workspaces according to your needs. So you can have three
| workspace and have two share a single profile.
|
| If those features aren't compelling to you that's fine.
| Just say so. But please comment constructively or not at
| all. I genuinely have no interest in trying to "sell"
| anyone on this workflow. I was just answering the
| question.
|
| >what you described is still nothing more than moving
| windows around.
|
| Ok, even if that were true (it objectively isn't), I like
| wrangling less windows. How's that? Good enough for you?
| Why would I want four windows open, when I can have one
| or two (did I mention that I have ADHD)?
|
| If it helps, you can think of workspaces like another
| level of tabs. Tabs are objectively good right? Yet
| everything you can do with a tab can be done with a
| window. Right?
| quasarj wrote:
| Doesn't FF have them as well? Or maybe it's an extension.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Workspace is mainly just managing Tabs. While Profiles are
| separating all settings, including addons, passwords,
| bookmarks, etc.
| layer8 wrote:
| Whenever I read "beautiful" in marketing copy, I'm immediately
| put off. It's so presumptuous and conveys vanity. Moreover, users
| may prefer their software to be utilitarian, and in any case are
| likely to have different opinions on what constitutes "beauty".
| For that aspect: Show, don't tell. If people do find it
| beautiful, then they don't need to be told. And if they don't,
| then telling them is unlikely to change that.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I don't find it off-putting. I may or may not agree that the
| software is beautiful because, as you point out, people often
| have different opinions on what constitutes beauty.
|
| All the same, I find it useful to know that the authors of the
| software consider "beauty" one of their goals. And beauty does
| not preclude utility.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I read it the opposite way:
|
| - I feel more passion from the author.
|
| - I value the pride they show in their work.
|
| - I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with
| the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful
| software will actually report it's less buggy.
|
| The problem is when someone makes appearances more important
| than being useful.
|
| But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt.
|
| We need more browser diversity.
| gexla wrote:
| How do you know it was one of the developers who wrote this?
| Maybe they hired someone to create the site and the content.
| Granted, the site is in the repo and you can see who
| committed the assets. But that still doesn't tell you who
| originally wrote it.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| You're suggesting one of the developers went through all
| the trouble to create a browser, then allowed someone to
| add assets to the repo without the developer reviewing them
| first?
| gexla wrote:
| I'm suggesting that you don't know who wrote the content.
| You don't know the developers wrote it. And if a non-
| developer wrote it, then that person probably isn't going
| to commit the content to a repo.
| mthoms wrote:
| The developers either created or commissioned the website.
| Accordingly, I think we can safely assume it conveys their
| goals.
| dartos wrote:
| This is based on Firefox, so it doesn't really help with
| browser diversity.
|
| Ladybird does, but it's not really ready for prime time yet
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Of course it does.
|
| Right now FF shares are so low devs are ignoring it.
|
| If more browsers use this engine, more devs will test with
| it.
|
| Also, if it reaches success, it make FF future more robust,
| which also helps with future diversity.
| dartos wrote:
| No way.
|
| If google decides that they don't want to fund Mozilla
| anymore, then these Firefox derivatives fall as well. I
| don't really see the zen team (or other ff forks) hiring
| the FF devs that are making 6 figures at Mozilla.
|
| If Firefox decides to deeply ingrain some DRM standard,
| there's a high likelihood that it'll be included in
| downstream browsers like this one, unless they are
| privacy nuts like librewolf.
|
| We need entirely new browsers that are more than window
| dressing on top of existing ones.
| immibis wrote:
| Remember what happened to Thunderbird, though. Mozilla
| dropped it, and it got better. There are good reasons to
| think that Mozilla - the corporate entity - is cancer.
| dartos wrote:
| Isn't thunderbird still part of Mozilla?
|
| It says it still is on their site.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > Thunderbird operates in a for-profit subsidiary of the
| non-profit Mozilla Foundation.
|
| I guess the answer is yes.
| cxr wrote:
| Nominally yes, and insofar as the Mozilla Foundation is
| "Mozilla". Even then, the relationship is ceremonial.
|
| And Mozilla Corp is something different altogether.
| dartos wrote:
| If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, odds are
| it's a duck.
| cxr wrote:
| [delayed]
| beAbU wrote:
| The first sentence in the first paragraph on the website is
| "beautifully designed". Clearly the creator wants to bring to
| our attention that they spent a lot of time designing the
| visual aspects of this browser. And from the looks of things,
| this is indeed true. The browser does look very beautiful.
|
| But... this is literally form over function.
|
| Browsers should be like car tyres. Only after you have
| selected for your functional use case and requirements, do
| you filter for visual aesthetics.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I feel the same, and not just about "beautiful". Any time a
| marketing person tells me how to think about their product, it
| pushes me away. Tell me what it is, now how I should think
| about it.
| gexla wrote:
| Imagine having an artist who does paintings and an architect
| both come up with a concept for a building. Then have each
| explain their design decisions and why you might select that
| concept. Each are going to use much different language,
| though each concept might still be described as beautiful by
| a judge. Of course, you still need to craft your language to
| appeal to the buyer, but an architect can probably still do
| that more effectively. And that architect likely isn't going
| to use the word "beautiful." The architect's message would
| likely resonate with me because I could feel the domain
| knowledge and craft skills shining through.
| mionhe wrote:
| I think you be comparing an amateur artist with a
| professional architect (which isn't surprising; amateur
| architects are very rare and professional artists have less
| visibility.) Only amateur artists would actually describe
| their work as "beautiful".
|
| If you go to a gallery or museum and read what a
| professional artist says about their own work (usually
| found on little cards next to paintings/scriptures/etc.)
| their descriptions tend to be about much more focused on
| what they were trying to convey and how they used that
| medium to do it.
|
| This is also what I've seen from professional architects.
|
| That doesn't mean you would be any more swayed by the
| professional artist, but it's at least more apples to
| apples.
| gexla wrote:
| A couple of things on this...
|
| If only an amateur would use the word beautiful, then was
| it an amateur who wrote the content for this site?
|
| The core of my comment was that different professions use
| different language. In your example, I may find a similar
| level of skillful description of their work, but that's
| not going to cross over into different domains. The
| architect would likely write a more compelling pitch for
| a building design concept than an artist who is a
| painter. The artist may not use the word "beautiful" but
| still may use other language which is a similar miss in
| domain language used for a successful pitch.
|
| In my field, I have to sell software development services
| to customers who may not be technical. I have to be
| careful to limit the depth of my technical explanations.
| But I'm still going to use just enough domain language
| that the customer will intuitively understand that I have
| a better grasp of the work to be done than the newly
| hired sales guy who is doing a pitch for the company he
| represents.
|
| Here's a snippet from "above the fold."
|
| > Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with
| features.
|
| Packed with features? That's like creating a menu item in
| your site nav entitled "Stuff" or "Misc."
|
| Maybe they were just in a hurry.
| niam wrote:
| That's my instinct when people describe _themselves_ , too.
| e.g in dating profiles when people remark about how "I'm
| smart, funny", etc.
|
| They may be both of those things! But I can't help that my
| first conceit is always to think "that's not yours to decide
| here".
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| You mean "tell me what it _does_ ". Beautiful _is_ what a
| thing is. And what a thing _does_ follows from _what_ it is.
|
| Contrary to modern misconception, beauty is objective. Taste
| is subjective. What makes good taste is alignment of the
| subjective with the objective.
|
| So, in this case, we can ask "what makes a browser
| beautiful?". Well, since it is a tool, then its usefulness is
| intrinsic to the kind of thing it is. So, how useful it is
| _as browser_ is constitutive of its beauty, as beauty has to
| do with the perfection with which something realizes the kind
| of thing it is.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > You mean "tell me what it does". Beautiful is what a
| thing is. And what a thing does follows from what it is.
|
| If they state in the readme that it's a web browser and I
| can compile it using GNU make then I'll believe them. If
| they say it's whizzy fast and easy to learn then I'll
| consider that's probably somewhat true. If I read
| "beautiful" and "paradigm-changing" and "redefines the
| browsing experience" then I imagine they're just trying to
| puff themselves up without having anything concrete to back
| it up.
|
| It's true that things can be beautiful, and there are some
| universal (enough) beauty standards. The signal of being
| beautiful is not saying "look how beautiful I am" though.
| It's easy to claim something like that and hard to refute,
| so it's not a very good signal. The beauty should speak for
| itself, or at least be attested to be a third-party like
| with a quote from a review.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I like it, because it shows the author's aspiration. Not all
| software aims to be visually appealing, which is totally fine.
| But depending on what the software is, aesthetics are something
| that I find important.
|
| For browsers in particular, that is a major reason why I don't
| use any of the existing Firefox forks: they are all very
| utilitarian. But I look at a browser window pretty much all day
| long, so I prefer a visual design that brings me joy.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's probably for the best, every time Firefox tries to
| make itself look nicer they manage to make UX worse in the
| process.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Can we just have two separate things? One is a browser that
| works well, and the other could be maybe some pretty pieces
| of paper that you can stick over the UI elements that don't
| spark joy for you.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Why do they ned to be separate?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > I prefer a visual design that brings me joy
|
| This sounds like a marketing-speak. Joy is not an experience
| gained by staring at the visual design of a browser. You are
| confusing joy and another experience, perhaps appeal or
| attraction.
|
| If you genuinely experience joy from browser visual design,
| you are probably that same guy who experiences "delight" when
| a customer support representative treats you well on a phone
| call.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Why are you spending your time explaining to people you've
| never met what kinds of emotions they feel, or how
| legitimate their emotions are?
| gexla wrote:
| From the site...
|
| > Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with
| features.
|
| If I'm going to put in the effort to create something like
| this. There is ONE powerful reason which compels me to do this.
| If I'm pitching this to an investor, then I need to craft a
| message to convince the investor to hand over money. The above
| line is wasting space.
|
| I get a sense that the message is either crafted by developers
| who are horrible at doing so, or by copy people who know
| nothing about the product. And in neither case does anyone
| spend significant time finding and interacting with passionate
| potential users to find what sorts of messaging resonates with
| them. As with writing, you need to find your voice, and let
| that voice drive the messaging.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't even bother starting such a project if I
| didn't get to the "find your voice" part. Maybe the developers
| have some hand-wavy plan to sell options and accessories rather
| than having a strong starting point to solving a problem.
| mthoms wrote:
| Come on. It's an open-source, community-funded, soft-launch
| of an alpha product. The cynicism on this site is really over
| the top sometimes.
| layer8 wrote:
| In that case, the website wants to make it look like a
| polished professional product, which is cringe at best and
| disingenuous at worst.
| mthoms wrote:
| If that's the impression you got, I don't know what to
| tell you. Among the very first words on the page are
| "Donate" (clearly indicating that it is _not_ a
| professional product). And directly below that we have
| the words "Introducing Zen Alpha" which should tell you
| to expect a product that is _anything but_ polished.
|
| >is cringe at best and disingenuous at worst.
|
| Groan. Can we stop with the hyperbole and be a little
| more constructive? You're saying it's "cringe" and
| "disingenuous" because they used a professional looking
| template and their marketing copy needs work? Let's give
| them the benefit of the doubt, shall we?
| gexla wrote:
| It's still hopefully useful dialogue on a common subject. I
| would be grateful to get this much feedback. And the
| discussion helps boost the visibility of this project on
| HN. Pick apart my work all you like, I'm happy to see it
| continue to hover on page 1. Please continue.
| mthoms wrote:
| It's not the message, it's the delivery. Some people
| don't react well to having their skills publicly derided
| as "horrible". We're all human after all.
| gexla wrote:
| That's feedback. You don't survive in this world without
| feedback. Even in Kindergarten, you had grades. What
| world do you come from?
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I don't like it either. It's the language popularised by Apple
| and it makes me cringe every single time.
|
| But is it really the most important thing you have to say about
| a new browser?
|
| It's just marketing language after all. A lot of great products
| are marketed using this repulsive language. I couldn't care
| less.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Speaking of marketing, whenever I see a comparison chart where
| "our product" ticks all the boxes, I immediately think "what
| criteria did you not include in the comparison?"
| WD-42 wrote:
| I normally don't mind but this landing page in particular is a
| bit extra.
| nosioptar wrote:
| Also, beauty is in the eye of the beerholder. I don't consider
| the screenshots of Zen to be beautiful by any measure. It's a
| mess of grey on grey, none of the buttons look like buttons,
| and I'm getting a headache from all the moving crap on the home
| page.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Any difference besides the UI to using sideberry with containers?
|
| E.g. seperated history suggestions or something?
| ikari_pl wrote:
| definitely not any of the differences that make Arc attractive
| (new windows aren't portals to the same tabs, cmd+t doesn't
| open a tab/command bar, search doesn't turn into AI search...)
| account42 wrote:
| What is it with modern software and ungoogleable names. Make up
| something unique instead of just using short english words FFS.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I've been wanting split view in FF for a long time, so I'm going
| to try this right now
|
| And I know somebody, somewhere, is going to argue that it should
| be the job of the desktop.
|
| I disagree.
|
| I don't want to have to create each context I want things to
| exist in, and manipulate that carefully.
|
| I like automatic context. That's why I like tabs in my browser
| and not a thousand windows. And that's why I enjoy my split views
| to be inside the tabs I just created.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I use vertical tabs, so I don't want 2 windows with tabs, I
| want 1 window with tabs-1stview-2ndview
| depingus wrote:
| Mozilla maintains a Firefox extension that does split view in
| the browser. Its called Side View.
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-view/
| butz wrote:
| "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by
| Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing." What?
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| I'm sure that you can piece together how this could happen.
| slenk wrote:
| A lot of legitimate Firefox Addons say that. Just means Moz
| can't manually review every single extension if they want
| to allow their users a good extension experience...unlike
| developing Chrome extensions
| tredre3 wrote:
| > Just means Moz can't manually review every single
| extension
|
| The extension in question is authored by Mozilla.
| lagniappe wrote:
| That's a sidebar, they're not the same. It requires hacks to
| change the dimensions to a true split, and the things like
| zoom and extensions don't work the same in it. This is a
| half-measure at best.
| alimbada wrote:
| I've tried it. It's not nearly half as good as Edge's split
| screen feature.
| grounder wrote:
| Vivaldi has split view / tab tiling and I really like it too.
| Vivaldi is based on Chromium.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Vote here: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-
| tab-in-tab...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Or don't waste your time, given Mozilla management does
| whatever it or Google wants? Just like with Google, nobody
| works on anything that won't help get them promoted?
|
| There are decade-old "everyone agrees this sucks, please fix
| it" bugs in bugzilla that are ignored because nobody in
| management or development cares. It's not sexy, can't go on
| their resume, it won't let them give presentations at
| conferences, or get them on people's podcasts, or tweeted
| about...
| ziddoap wrote:
| 76 ideas which were submitted are currently in development
| and 84 have been delivered.
|
| Using your anger/passion to try and sway people to be even
| _less_ involved doesn 't help anyone.
| imchillyb wrote:
| OP stated that there are bugs over a decade old at this
| point, that still exist due to the concerns mentioned.
|
| You didn't address his statement nor his concerns.
|
| You avoided that part of the conversation to basically
| tell him to shut up.
|
| Address the issues first, like Firefox management team
| should be doing, but aren't.
|
| I'm with OP. Firefox is a horrible user experience. And
| it's that way by design. Couldn't have Google stop paying
| Mozilla's bills now could they?
| ziddoap wrote:
| ReadCarlBarks linked to where you can vote on ideas.
|
| KennyBlanken said don't bother to vote on ideas because
| they wont listen.
|
| I pointed out that many ideas are in development or have
| been delivered (i.e. they do listen).
|
| The rest seems pretty boring to discuss and unlikely to
| be a productive conversation. I'm already bored trying to
| explain this.
| qurashee wrote:
| "The only limit is your imagination" is a direct reference to
| zombo.com for me
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I have been using Firefox since after 2004 (I'm not sure if it
| was 2005 or 2006) and while I love the browser, I wish they would
| invest moreso in just making it less cluttered. One of the first
| things I do when I install Firefox is get rid of the stupid gaps
| next to the URL bar. Every. single. time. It really angers me.
| Who wanted that? Do people leave it on because they can't figure
| out how to remove them?
|
| We had a browser aiming towards being a full on Rust application,
| and I was excited and cheering that on, not because it was Rust,
| but because the focus by shifting to Rust was security and speed.
| Now I'm not sure the focus.
|
| I like how sleek this browser looks, and the "themes" seem to
| target very specific needs of minimalizing the UI which I also
| appreciate. I'll have to pull this one down for my Linux box to
| try it out.
| someone4958923 wrote:
| > One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is get
| rid of the stupid gaps next to the URL bar. Every. single.
| time. I
|
| THIS! This is the first thing I do after installing firefox.
| Nice to see I'm not the only one :)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I can't go 1 minute with that thing turned on, it drives me
| crazy.
| gpm wrote:
| femou are you the author?
|
| https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/tree/main/src/browser...
| has a submodule pointing to https://github.com/zen-
| browser/components/tree/dab7fd0b2fbf2... which isn't public... I
| assume that's an oversight.
| Izmaki wrote:
| Woops.
| brianzelip wrote:
| Finally something not chromium!
| eddyg wrote:
| The most game-changing thing for me about Arc has been Air
| Traffic Control. I have spaces set up my various web-based apps,
| and previously they would be scattered among my dozens of browser
| windows. Now, the tabs of each web app are beautifully contained
| in their own spaces, thanks to ATC.
|
| Any idea if Zen supports this? And _ctrl-tab_ for quickly cycling
| between recent tabs (even across Spaces)?
| mazugrin2 wrote:
| femou, are you affiliated with Zen? Do you know if there are any
| plans to add support for ARM users running Windows or Linux?
| jeremiahlee wrote:
| Website getting hugged to death for a second day. Direct link to
| downloads from the GitHub releases: https://github.com/zen-
| browser/desktop/releases
| causality0 wrote:
| Someone want to explain what "based on the Firefox engine" means?
| Is it a fork of Firefox or do they think I'm too stupid to know
| what Gecko is?
| Kokouane wrote:
| Not a fork, it is just based on Gecko from what I can tell on
| their GitHub. To be fair, Zen is clearly targeting a regular
| audience who most likely do not know what Gecko is.
| remedan wrote:
| I really like the UI! I use Firefox with Sidebery and the top tab
| bar hidden via userChrome.css, which is kind of a hassle. Zen
| supports that kind of layout out of the box.
|
| I'm very happy to see a new modern browser not based on Chromium.
| Will definitely test drive it to see if it's worth switching to.
| hodanli wrote:
| i really like the hierarchy in sidebery
| jedisct1 wrote:
| Do people really care about the engine being used under the hood?
|
| From a user perspective, I see no difference between Blink,
| Webkit and Gecko. And when there is, it's a website that has only
| been tested on Blink, or uses features not available elsewhere.
| rocketvole wrote:
| traditionally no, but adblocking on firefox has been
| traditionally better and chrome(and therefore chromium) is
| about to break many adblocks
| tjoff wrote:
| Yes, I care deeply about diversity in the browser land.
|
| Luckily Gecko also performs the best for me.
| shafyy wrote:
| Looks promising. How do you plan on being financially
| sustainable?
| chown wrote:
| I've recently started using Arc mostly out of FOMO and there are
| parts that I like and parts I don't. I have been a Firefox user
| for a long time before that so glad to see something similar
| that's one of the major priorities is the aesthetics and I very
| much appreciate that.
|
| I tried to use it on my macOS Apple Silicone and got an error
| about it being broken and macOS suggested to trash it. Not sure
| if it is a bug issue. Will come back and try it again though to
| give it a second chance :)
| sparky_ wrote:
| This super unhelpful error is sometimes the result of trying to
| run an unsigned or developer signed binary on Apple Silicon.
| Try `xattr -d com.apple.quarantine program.app`, then open it
| by right clicking on the app, and selecting 'Open' while
| holding option + command.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Bypassing Gatekeeper (the binary signing process in macOS)
| does not seem like a good idea when downloading apps off
| random websites.
| causal wrote:
| +1 on Apple Silicon build being damaged. A lot of users that
| care about aesthetic are going to be on MBPs and they're all
| blocked right now.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Pretty sure this is the invalid signature error, not just
| unsigned which usually works via right click -> open.
|
| Not that it helps, but its kind of an easy error to make. I
| want to try it too but I guess I'll wait.
| dimal wrote:
| I thought the same thing, but that didn't work for me. It's
| busted.
| xuf wrote:
| This is described in their FAQ. Running `xattr -d
| com.apple.quarantine '/Applications/Zen Browser.app/'` fixes
| the issue, see https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#zen-browser-is-
| damaged-and-...
| thraway3837 wrote:
| I'll suggest that bypassing Gatekeeper for an unknwon app
| from an unknown developer is a bad idea. I'll wait until they
| implement official code signing from Apple.
| 0x2a wrote:
| It also breaks support for integrating with the 1Password
| desktop app.
| chrisabrams wrote:
| I tried downloading this for MacOS Silicon and was told the dmg
| was damaged :/ Guess I'll wait a little bit for things to iron
| out.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Images on the landing page look very pixelated
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| I'm very interested! Before I adopt, could you please share
| what's your business model?
| lagniappe wrote:
| "Zen Browser.app" is damaged and can't be opened. You should
| eject the disk image.
|
| Current MacOS on M2
| ObscureMind wrote:
| cd /Applications && xattr -d com.apple.provenance "Zen
| Browser.app"/ && xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "Zen
| Browser.app"/
| lagniappe wrote:
| I appreciate it, but I'll wait.
|
| When you enter a restaurant or hotel, and the lobby is
| disheveled, the parts you can't see likely won't be of a
| higher standard. Not for me yet.
| ertucetin wrote:
| Why are there so many new browsers these days? Is there really
| that much demand for them? Considering that creating one is very
| hard and requires a team.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The situation is pretty bad, where there are only two browsers:
| an ad-company controlled one that is making life harder for ad-
| blockers, and Firefox which is... fine, but somehow both
| stagnant and unfocused.
|
| So, the opening is there, can't blame people for trying to fill
| it.
|
| OTOH this is just a Firefox fork advertised as a new browser.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| Don't forget Safari. Essentially there are three browser
| engines that all browsers are built on. The only engine that
| is truly new in the last 15 years is Servo. (And maybe
| Ladybird)
| bee_rider wrote:
| lol, I posted the comment from mobile safari but didn't
| think of it. Eh, closed source software doesn't count,
| haha.
| ebri wrote:
| I'll take qutebrowser any day. Best damn thing I've learned to
| use since (n)vim.
| bogwog wrote:
| I hope a sustainable Firefox fork emerges soon because it seems
| Google's illegal default search deals (aka the only thing keeping
| Mozilla afloat) are coming to an end. That's a great thing in
| general, but it would really suck if FF died and we all got stuck
| with Chrome derivatives.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for my web browser if it's
| good. I wouldn't pay for Mozilla's FF, but I _would_ pay for a
| fork of it by a company whose business model doesn 't involve ads
| or selling data. I happily pay for Kagi, and will happily pay for
| the app that I use the most.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Mozilla could keep building FF without Google, but it would
| require that 90% of the C suite get laid off and dedicated
| focus from the company...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Good. They've lost market share continuously for _fifteen
| years_.
|
| In 2009 they had a 30% market share.
|
| Now they have a 5-6% market share.
|
| 4/5ths of their market share, gone.
| choilive wrote:
| The number of internet users have also gone up 300% over
| that time period, so on absolute terms they still have a
| sizeable user base.. but yes. They need to figure out how
| to increase market share.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| They are even losing users in absolute terms: check
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
| observationist wrote:
| 2.8% in July '24, Linux has a higher desktop market share
| than Firefox has browser share.
| beefnugs wrote:
| Nah, they would just enshittify like everyone else. This
| world is trash. The only hope is it pisses off enough people
| for them to contribute to some open competitor, the circle of
| softwarelife
| Barrin92 wrote:
| For the fiscal year 2022 which is the most recent data on
| Wikipedia, it says that 81% of Mozilla's revenue is from
| Google (about 480 million) they list 220 million as expenses
| for software development.
|
| If they lost the Google revenue they wouldn't just have to
| fire "the C suite" but lay off most of their engineers. An
| independent browser engine is a project with code in the tens
| of millions of lines, you obviously need to pay hundreds or
| of engineers to work on this, which is why there's pretty
| much only three competitive ones, all maintained with
| significant resources.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
| WD-42 wrote:
| Hundreds of developers?
|
| It's a large code base, but it doesn't require hundreds of
| developers working concurrently to keep it up to date. Web
| standards move fast, but not that fast.
|
| Take a look at Ladybird. There's a browser being built
| _from scratch_ with a small team (less than 10?)
|
| If Mozilla fired 90% of it's employees and kept the 10% to
| actually work on Firefox, it could be a great browser.
| forthwall wrote:
| I'm really enjoying the experience of Zen. I appreciate a
| ~modernish~ style and UX paradigm on a browser that isn't chrome
| based. Keep it up!
| explosion-s wrote:
| I've recently made a similar (more modular) project which
| compiles various features and patches them into a Firefox
| profile. It can compile themes, hardening, userscripts,
| userstyles and more into a clean firefox profile, basically
| removing the bloat from firefox while still being fully
| customizable: https://github.com/explosion-scratch/firebuilder
| btown wrote:
| Really cool! Do you know if there's anything similar for
| Chrome?
| explosion-s wrote:
| I don't think so, it's a lot harder to patch chrome because
| you'd need to recompile it. There is ungoogled-chromium but
| it doesn't add many features, mainly takes away the bloat.
| Unfortunately drm content is a bit finicky in ungoogled
| chromium.
|
| Firefox is great for modding because everything is contained
| in one profile folder, so one can simply make a new profile
| folder however they want and have the perfect browser
| mnmalst wrote:
| This looks really great. One thing I have never seen done is
| having the url bar completely removed and put everything in the
| sidebar. That would really save some vertical space. Since you
| seem to know your way around the firefox sources, do you think
| that's possible?
| explosion-s wrote:
| Im not sure - most of what my project does is compile
| multiple people's modifications together, I feel like I saw
| one such repo recently, I'll reply if I find it
| reubenmorais wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by having the URL bar completely
| removed (how do you navigate?) but I use CSS to trim the top
| of my Firefox to look a bit neater with the Sideberry
| extension: https://gist.github.com/reuben/4afa453611abd7f1477
| 429b2c001f...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Downloads/firebuilder-darwin-arm64 24334 | allowPositionals:
| true 24335 | }); 24336 | var PROFILE_PATH_CLI =
| args.positionals[2]; 24337 | var THIS_DIR2 = __dirname; 24338 |
| var MODULE_DIR2 = resolve4(THIS_DIR2, "modules"); 24339 | var
| OPTIONS = Object.fromEntries(readdirSync2(resolve4(MODULE_DIR2)
| ).filter((i) => lstatSync2(join8(MODULE_DIR2,
| i)).isDirectory()).map((i) => ({ ^ ENOENT: No such file or
| directory errno: -2 syscall: "open" path:
| "/Users/tjs/Documents/.coding/firefox-profile-creator/modules"
| at /$bunfs/root/firebuilder-darwin-arm64:24339:34
|
| Downloads/firebuilder-darwin-arm64 --help
|
| 24322 | import {parseArgs} from "util"; 24323 | import {homedir
| as homedir2} from "os"; 24324 | var __dirname =
| "/Users/tjs/Documents/.coding/firefox-profile-creator"; 24325 |
| var APP_PATH = join8("/Applications", "Firefox.app",
| "Contents", "MacOS", "firefox"); 24326 | var PROFILES_PATH =
| resolve4(homedir2(), "Library", "Application Support",
| "Firefox", "Profiles"); 24327 | var args = parseArgs({ args:
| Bun.argv, options: { launch: { type: "boolean" } },
| allowPositionals: true }); ^ TypeError: Unknown option '--
| help'. To specify a positional argument starting with a '-',
| place it at the end of the command after '--', as in '-- "--
| help" code: "ERR_PARSE_ARGS_UNKNOWN_OPTION"
| at /$bunfs/root/firebuilder-darwin-arm64:24327:12
|
| Little documentation on how to use it, either...
| wpwpwpw wrote:
| Thank you for your work! I believe it's not ready for daily
| driving, but I was happy to try it out and, maybe, to check again
| later so it replaces firefox. Loved all the new features and look
| and feel. However, there are some quirks I'll describe here,
| maybe they'll be useful. The sidebar is missing some hover popups
| so one can know what the buttons mean; animations, in general,
| are not very good, making the interface look rough; some parts of
| the regular firefox interface are just "glued in", and they feel
| a bit alien / missing integration (bookmarks, history...); tab
| bar at right side not working, although there is a button for it
| (useful for wide monitors in which you pin the window to the
| right side). Keep going!
| jdeaton wrote:
| The macos disk images are "broken" according to my os.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| The website design is really cool! I love it!
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I hate it; it looks like a Tiktok adshort and I gathered no
| useful information despite significant movement through the
| voluminous scroll bar.
| krunck wrote:
| Design is meaningless when there is zero content. The site has
| no information to help me in making a decision of whether I
| should try it out. No technical information at all.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| I'll say it again, the golden standard for workspaces and
| sidebars is Sideberry and it's written for Firefox. Always glad
| to see new browser chrome efforts building on Firefox but it's
| such a high bar. Will still give this a try though.
| rchaud wrote:
| Very cool project, happy to see a browser that's not a Chromium
| fork for once.
|
| Some feedback:
|
| - Web Panels: have an option for letting CTRL + Click (or other
| shortcut) open the link in the Web Panel sidebar. Drag and
| dropping the link into the sidebar would be a good shortcut as
| well. This works for use cases like browsing a search results
| page, and opening multiple links without losing focus on the
| search results page itself.
|
| - Horizontal Nav Bar: Vivaldi and Arc browser both have no
| horizontal bar taking up real estate. Maybe this is not possible
| to replicate with an FF fork, but having sidebar navigation AND a
| mostly full size top nav bar is redundant.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Really cool but so far noone was able to package it for NixOS:
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/327982
| tamimio wrote:
| I will give it a try. Firefox has recently not been the best,
| especially in private browsing mode. Opening less than 15 tabs
| there, and it's already using 25 GiB of RAM!
| cynical_slave wrote:
| I want the newest open tab to be at the top of the list, not at
| the bottom. The top is where your mouse usually is, that's where
| the website controls are, that's where stuff happens. Having to
| move the mouse to the bottom to activate recent tabs is annoying,
| especially on huge monitors.
|
| It baffles me that none of the browsers or extensions that
| implement sidebar tabs have this option.
| TuxMark5 wrote:
| Sideberry for Firefox has settings that allow changing how new
| tabs behave. One of the settings allows placing new tabs on top
| of the list.
| sweeter wrote:
| You had me at tab groups. It is baffling that Firefox has refused
| to do anything sane about tab groups.
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