plus the usual betterfox
I am currently trying to see if I can replace Firefox with Zen. Zen still has some Firefox telemetry but they are off by default, so I like it. I think difference under the hood is DRM. Maybe it is time to finally ditch Netflix.
I will likely ditch Vivaldi for this one tab groups gets implemented. It has all the features I need and I’ve been looking for a non-chromium browser to switch to for a while. Floorp was close but missing critical features. Zen is very exciting for me.
New Firefox forks are quite interesting. I’ve tried it, these are my impressions so far:
- The UI looks a little bit too much like a generic electron app to me, there is no option for native GTK or QT theming.
- It seems they ship version that use the newer CPU instructions to optimize the application, I’m not sure standard Firefox does. This is neat. It does feel a bit faster but I’m unsure whether this is because of optimizations or because I have 100x as many tabs open on vanilla Firefox right now.
- The vertical tabs are very nice. I currently use the “Tree Style Tab” extension and some hacky CSS scripts for that, and this seems like it would work a lot better.
- The shortcuts are off by default, which is nice, but still seem to be the same as Firefox.
- It feels a bit buggy. I had to restart the application to be able to load a site.
- They kept Firefox sync, which I like.
- You can choose between dark and light mode on the first startup, but I haven’t been able to find the setting again.
Conclusion Overall, a decent Firefox rebrand. Better tab management, split windows, and workspaces seem quite nice. I would probably consider using it if it put the settings in 1 place and didn’t have any bugs.
So far I really like it, some minor gripes like the private browsing window being hard to distinguish and Pocket being missing (I’m one of the 5 persons that uses it), but for that first one there’s already a GitHub issue opened.
Did you look in about:config ? Maybe the flag for Pocket is there but turned off.
I’m on mobile now otherwise I’d check
Love to see it! I think with Google ranking the core privacy functionality of Chromium we will see more new browsers being forked from FF.
