In the field of web browsers, I switched to Vivaldi a long time ago. There are many reasons, but I can summarize them with one word: productivity. Firefox is a good browser, but it is lame if we want to do more than browse. I I took the leap It's been three years now? But I might never have had it if I were like Zen Browser. It is currently in the development phase, and is the fork of Firefox that demanding users should try.
If someone knows the Vivaldi interface, as is my case, they will notice that Zen Browser's looks a bit similar. It's true that the side panel is also in Opera, for example, but I don't know, the settings wheel down there and other things... maybe it just seems that way to me. What is clear is that it is very different from Firefox, which it improves in many aspects. You could say that Zen Browser is what Firefox should be if they were considering offering a most productive browser.
Zen Browser allows tab stacking and much more
The first thing that differentiates Zen Browser from its red panda browser ancestor is that it supports stacked eyelashes after the installation of 0. It is noted that there are components that are in a very early phase, but it points out ways. Although on its official website it promises that they can be stacked like Vivaldi does, this is not currently the case. From my tests, many tabs can now be automatically stacked, but they cannot be resized nor have I found the option to unstack. But it allows stacks of tabs.
It also has a side bar. Housed in what would be the left panel, it is as expected: a point where we add pages and see them in a different size. For example, there we can have social networks, like X and WhatsApp, and services like Inoreader or a translator. This type of access is very useful, and when you try it there is no going back.
Zen Browser has also proposed to fill the lack of profiles in Firefox. Yes, in the Mozilla browser they exist, but this fork makes it easier to use these profiles. This way, we can share our browser without sharing our data, or we can use one personal profile and another for work or whatever we want.
Other features, what's coming and things to improve
Zen Browser is in development right now, and is not recommended for use for anything other than testing. Also available now are the Workspaces, something that I use in Vivaldi to separate a general navigation, one for blogs and another for development. But it can also be used for other purposes, such as creating a workspace for a trip we are going to take and leaving all the links that are of interest to us there.
Default, The tabs are in the left bar, and here there is a fault that can only be forgiven for the phase they are in: the tabs are small, the size of the side panel and only the icon. This is not a problem, in fact I like it, but it is that you cannot close the tabs... the "x" does appear if we expand the panel, but this loses some of its charm. They can be closed from the context menu by right-clicking.
Also important is the fact that at the moment only be in english. If we do not master the language of Shakespeare, we will have a problem, since it does not allow us to download other options.
In the future too They will add the option to group tabs, useful if there is a specific topic that we want to have well defined and we do not need a new workspace.
For everything else, it's Firefox inside, and also open source. It even has the option to collect data for personalized advertising, but it is disabled in Zen Browser. In short, it is the supervitamined red panda's browser, or it will be when they release a stable version.
Website and Installation
The official website is at this link. There we will find a section with downloads, and Linux users can choose an AppImage, the Flatpak version or a portable, that is, as the firefox binaries. Users of an Arch-based distro also have it in AUR with the name zen-browser-bin.
I like the concept, and we'll see if I make my way back to "Firefox" if Manifest v3 ends up harming Chromium users.