I’ve been seeing a lot of buzz about Zen Browser lately and I’m curious if it lives up to the hype.

For those who have been daily driving it for a while:

  • Performance: Does it feel snappy compared to Chrome or regular Firefox?
  • Resources: How is it on RAM and battery life? (Especially on MacOS)
  • Stability: Is it buggy? Are there any deal-breaking glitches you run into often?
  • Workflows: How good are the vertical tabs and workspace features in practice?

I'm currently using Firefox and thinking of making the jump. Honest thoughts?

  • It will perform worse than Chrome, that's just the nature of it being Firefox-based. But switching browsers is so easy nowadays that it will take you like 10 minutes to download it and import all your settings from Firefox, so you really don't lose much by just downloading it and giving it a try. You don't like it? Easy to switch back as well.

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    Don’t make it easy! It’s meant to be a life choice and picking a side!

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  • Performance: Does it feel snappy compared to Chrome or regular Firefox?

    Feels the same as Firefox

    Resources: How is it on RAM and battery life? (Especially on MacOS)

    Same as Firefox

    Stability: Is it buggy? Are there any deal-breaking glitches you run into often?

    No deal-breakers but it does tend to be a bit buggy, more like visual glitches/misalignment than anything serious functionality-wise

    Workflows: How good are the vertical tabs and workspace features in practice?

    Given that Firefox has vertical tabs upstream now.. the main advantage of Zen is the little UI tweaks, some from Arc, some are things there were open Mozilla bugs about, in some cases for a decade, but Mozilla's priorities were elsewhere. So in that sense Zen is a strict but slight improvement over Firefox I'd say

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    thanks for such a detailed view

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  • Performance is the same as firefox and for the rest, you really just have to try it and see with an open mind as the philosophy is not the same as your regular browser.

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  • I like it more than Firefox. My second favorite is Waterfox.

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    Been using Waterfox for a few months now, can't complain

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  • Performance is excellent.

    Resource use is excellent. It's written in Rust so that should tell you a lot.

    About the above two points I'm a person who's recently been using wave box and then Microsoft Edge and can tell you that even though those are feature packed with the things I need as a power user of over 100 tabs per day they are dogs slow. Google Chrome is a very performant browser but it's simply doesn't allow you to manage large numbers of tabs and none of the Chrome plugins for it really give you the the usability that the Zen browser does.

    , it seems quite stable to me

    , the vertical Tabs are excellent because you can Nest them arbitrarily deep using folders., the workspaces are excellent because they have English names. That might sound obvious but when you come from wave box which tries to tell you everything through the use of icons instead of English names you'll know what I mean.

    Zen browser also has an excellent addition to the workspace is called essential tabs and pin tabs. Essential Tabs are Global and are available across workspaces where is pentabs are local to a particular workspace. This allows you to take things which will be used across workspaces for example your Google calendar and have it global but then have local things for example a particular Google drive folder that's relevant to one workspace but not another.

    , I really can't believe that Zen browser has become so excellent but it really has period it does not work very well with the last past extension so I went ahead and switched over to bit Wharton and could have switched over to proton pass but that's a different story period

    , the main thing you need to do is just download it and try to do some tasks in the browser you're currently in and compare it to Zane browser. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

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    Resource use and performance is bad compared to chromium browsers

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    you havent seen Wavebox thrashing around like I've seen it: I dont think we can generalize about Chromium browsers. I'm very impressed with the performance of zen browser. and MS edge is a chromium browser too... packed with features. but not the fastest puppy in the world.

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  • I had switched to Arc a few months ago, but it got so glitchy so I switch again, to Vivaldi.

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  • I, personally, do not use it as my browser as I like to switch between vertical and horizontal tabs depending on what I am doing. However I have used it quite a bit to play around with it and a few in my office use it as their main browser.

    Performance and Resources: Similar to base Firefox at the start, but tends to get more laggy as time goes on.

    Stability: Buggier than Firefox, but not terrible at this point like it was.

    Workflows: The vert tabs are better than base Firefox, but not a game changer.

    Other stuff:

    The UI/UX is nice and a key feature of it.

    No DRM so no Netflix, etc. if that is your thing.

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  • No, it is not.

    If you want a développement see all the already written post about it

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  • The only issue i have faced is it gets too laggy ifit is open for a long time

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  • it's fine. feels the same as firefox to me

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  • No. Same as Firefox. Worse. And same as Arc, so mostly meh.

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