this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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102
What are your thoughts on Zen Browser becoming a lot more popular than Floorp? (api.star-history.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Right now is the best period of time yet for Firefox-based browser, especially when most alternative browsers are Chrome-based.

While there are a bunch of forks like Librewolf and Palemoon, they provide features mainly for power users like hardened privacy and tweaked user-prefs. A year ago the only fork I knew of, based on recent stable versions of Firefox and added productivity features on top was Floorp. I was very surprised at the hype and sudden popularity of Zen Browser in the past few months and have been curious why it grew so much faster than Floorp which has been around for much longer, look at the Github star graph: https://star-history.com/#zen-browser%2Fdesktop=&Date=. Zen Browser currently has 19.3K stars while Floorp has 6.1K.

Reasons I can think of are the following: heavy promotion of the browser by the devs and community on places like Reddit along with emphasizing its 'zen' philosophy, really fast development (it now has way more features than Floorp), and the Zen mods store, where you can install CSS mods.

What are your thoughts and reasons for Zen Browser becoming so popular so fast? (while its not mainstream, it did grow fast in among Firefox and power users)

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[–] pastermil 65 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Let's face it: People aren't gonna take something named 'Floorp' seriously.

If you do, especially to the point you're downvoting this, maybe it's time to ask yourselves why people are not taking you seriously.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

There is a certain strain of open source development that is nearly anti-marketing, as far as I can tell. They choose names like "gimp", "git", "frotz", "borg", "pooch", "butt", "slurm", "mutt", "snort", and "floorp".

[–] pastermil 13 points 2 weeks ago

At least "git" and "mutt" don't feel ridiculous when being pronounced.

The rest are pushing it, but they fill in specific niches that no other tool in their fields can provide, or at least on par with others in their fields.

The same cannot be said about floorp. It sounds ridiculous on your tongue, it looks ridiculous spelled out on the screen, it is just another Firefox fork.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I can add foot to the list

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

foo terminal

foot

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

I love this, we should maintain a list of these, it's like that "Pokémon or web technology?" thing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

ppl laugh when i suggest gimp as a foss alternate to adobe crap. oh well, their loss ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As an average user of Floorp. I hate the name

[–] pastermil 3 points 2 weeks ago

I respect that

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Not terribly fond of their icon as well. Personally, I would be willing to look past the name if they had a better icon.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not downvoting, but I do quite like that Floorp is just a bit weird. It makes it more fun to use lol.

[–] pastermil 2 points 2 weeks ago

I respect that

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah honestly they should change the name literally no one I have heard likes it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Floorp is made by young Japanese devs. They have uh, very different naming sensibilities...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

GIMP. Need I say more?