Zen Browser

[Zema Bus]

Interesting browser. I looked at it a few years ago, it has been growing in popularity and I saw a brief news clip about it yesterday in a Linux podcast so I thought I'd take another look. They say it was forked from Firefox, so presumably it is fully independent of Firefox.

zenBrowser.jpg

zenBrowser2.jpg

[Grogan]

Honestly, that looks terrible, like a dumbed down Windows file manager UI whose primary interface is a search field, or something. As a firefox fork, that seems more like a regression than an improvement. Let's make Mozilla more like Microsoft Edge. (and I don't like tiling, so that's lost on me. I'd detach a tab and be able to use both via focus follows mouse behaviour)

I looked into doing a build to see it for myself, and it looks too onerous. It's driven by javascript and uses that npm to fetch and build the parts. If you just want a black box and let it install all dependencies and build and run it through npm it might be easy, but the steps to make an actual usable, installable browser out of it, not so much.

Also, I read that ublock origin has reduced functionality on this browser.

[Zema Bus]

I got it a little better, I couldn't enable the menu bar though.

zenbrowser.jpg

[Grogan]

Yes, that's somewhat better. Now it's like a plain jane Chromium browser