this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Firefox

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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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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Happily using Zen browser until Servo comes along to eat Mozillas lunch finally.

[–] fruitycoder 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean isn't Servo just the Gecko replacement?

I am super excited about too, but it's kind of funny to say eat the company that built it and language around it's lunch lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

https://github.com/versotile-org/verso

This is the actual browser implementation being developed alongside. I just say Servo because more people recognize that name at the moment.

[–] fruitycoder 3 points 2 weeks ago

Awesome! Servo as an embedded solution is a great choice imho! Glad to see them start their to build into the full browser

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