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Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

zen-browser.app

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Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fonts do always look way better on Chrome. I can't explain it.

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.

+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).

Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#53

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.

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.

Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#55
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.

Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#57

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 advertis…

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.

Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#58

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.

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…

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.

Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#59

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.

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.

Re: Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine

#60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 in…

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.

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