Agreed, I've been a Firefox user since it was released, occasionally switching to Firefox derivatives because I dislike Chrome. This is probably my favourite so far.
Funny how Theo always shits on firefox, but many of the features he comments on here are actually firefox onse, and not specifically zen. I do agree this extra wrapper holds great potential though.
@@aluisiofsjr People are too obsessed with clean interfaces. Having features visible therefore easily accessible is a legitimate (and sometimes preferable) design philosophy. Browsers are complicated, and having the browser UI pretend it's simple wastes my time and mental effort.
3 месяца назад
@@aluisiofsjr You can change most of firefox UI. It's just html and css.
@@somerandompersonintheinternet he says im not a firefox guy, evidently thats because hes not used firefox in the past 10 years... firefox has had most of the features he was surprised about in zen for many many years now like the userChrome theming and profiles. Mozilla is also at fault for not pushing frontends for these cause clearly people find them cool and dont know about them
"their biggest hurdle is that they're using firefox as the base instead of chromium" yeahhh we don't need anymore chromium based browsers and give google even more influence than they already have over the web. he really needs to legitimately try and daily drive firefox.
I'd back this sentiment more if Firefox didn't basically rubber stamp 97% of what Google proposes for the web. Apple does that, too. That's why Ladybird is so exciting.
@@torspedia Oh, absolutely! But that's pretty far from something to daily today. And I think it's better for the health of the web to use Gecko now (while keeping an eye on things like Ladybird), than to use Blink/Chromium while waiting for something perfect.
A lot of those “new” features, like tab scrolling, have been possible in FF. The problem for FF has been the defaults, resistance to changing them, and the difficulty of configuring these customizations. What looks promising about Zen is that the defaults are better out of the box + there looks to be a clear and easy way to share these customizations through their “themes”. I think that paving the road for the community to explore customizations is going to be Zen’s killer feature. If they can continue to expose more and more of FF’s internals in a user friendly way, their future will be bright.
Tab Tiling and Vertical Bar definitely are not possible in FF tho. Users were begging for it for years, and Firefox just recently decided it should try vertical tabs in nightly. Dunno if this is based on that code, as last time I used it, things *weren't* working right, to say the least.
@@HoYinCheng Well, sorry if I interpreted it wrong, but I felt that you underplayed the effort of zen team, making it sound like it was "just" another user.js modification. chrome.css store like system could be even implemented externally through importing css files, but there is a worry about style conflicts, I'm curious how they tackle this if they allow community-curated styles, not just internal ones.
@@kaedriz I didn’t intend to underplay those changes. I was attempting to focus on and highlight an aspect of the browser that I think they are doing right but that I haven’t seen anyone, this video included, calling out as what I think can be their biggest game changer. The software that I see a parallel to is Obsidian. It did a lot of unique and great things, but what ended up being their killer feature was community plugins. I’d love to see encouragement of this because I think it would uniquely set them apart. Apologies if my attempt to focus on that made it sound like I was downplaying them. My default mode is to read comments in the most positive possible interpretation (HN etiquette) and tend to write assuming that.
exactly this. switched from chrome to FF because of the mv3 changes, and holy fk, having to change so much sht in config/chrome.css is just really sad. if FF is looking for more users coming from chrome, they need to change these defaults
Cool, a browser not using chromium for once! Also: i really hope ladybird project actually does work and we finally get a fully FOSS and independent browser. It's crazy we have monopolies in every single aspect of the fucking web
@@gljames24 Servo is intended for research, not general use, so it doesn't really count. Its advancements are meant to be extracted and merged into other browsers, not make it a competitor :Ü™
@@modernkennnern But we already have the titlebar, most tab bars don't extend past this anyway so vertical tabs doesn't actually save any screen space
@@myogg You are making a Windows assumption, On Linux, which is somewhat popular among FF users, you certainly are not guaranteed to have Title bar. In Gnome maybe, in most of KDE too (but you can hide that on maximized), but in tiling desktops, you certainly don't have title bars. And adding onto your actual argument, window controls can, and some themes already do something like this, be moved to address bar, like Zen does it even.
@@ivanv6862 That's different. Firefox also has profiles, but multi-account container allows simultaneous independent sessions within a profile. And the different sessions are attached per tab rather than per window/per process.
Theo must have never seen Firefox Containers if he thinks workspaces have to be separate windows. You can have two tabs immediately next to each other in completely different containers. MUCH more useful than Chrome and even Arc's implementation imo
JUst looking at the fact that it won't ship any AI-based-thingy-thing it sort of feels the right direction in what a browser should be/have. Focusing on simplicity, UX, performance and security should be the de-facto way of creating software and I feel like trying Zen out for all of that. Huge plus for being based on Firefox, which has always been my favorite browser so far.
True, if a product doesn't have AI displayed in its homepage, then I'm definitely interested. But I think it's going to have some AI in the future, as Firefox is going that path in the nightly, but at least these are mostly local LLMs.
they may call it a fork but i think it's gonna be more like a wrapper, not touching the engine parts but just the chrome parts (yes, thats what the ui parts are called, ironically)
I AM ZENNING SO HARD RIGHT NOW IM GONNA DAILY DRIVE IT (yes you should daily drive it for a bit. Btw i've done horizontal splitting on arc browser on windows)
I've switched too and it's great. The only major downside i see right now is the high usage of RAM even with just around 5 tabs open. Around 40% of 16 GB.
been playing with this for the day, it feels REALLY nice. Gonna main it for the next week and see how it goes. After Arc for Windows completely fell flat for me, it feels good to have a nice browser on windows for once lol
The thing about Ladybird is that "reinventing things for the sake of it" is literally the premise (of it and SerenityOS), but you're complaining as if they're not aware of it. Which... considering Ladybird's marketing, yeah, maybe. It might be considered a waste of time, but it's _their_ time they're spending. They do need to make it clear though.
The hype behind Ladybird is there precisely because they're not Firefox based or Chromium based. It's the only 100% independent browser that has the potential to be actually viable. Anything that gets us away from Google and Mozilla (considering how shaky their foundation is and how slimy they're getting) is a net positive.
@@spht9ng And the guy who single-handedly built an OS, userland and an awesome community from scratch doesn't? Why would anyone shit on an volunteer effort to build something, even if you think they are just doing it out of a principle? There is no scenario in which having a competing implementation is a net negative.
I think it would have been better if they used Servo and Rust (Like Versotile's Verso Browser is doing), but they are building their own rendering engine again (LibWeb), and also wasting time migrating from C++ to Swift.
@@spht9ng Iirc, there are plenty of very experienced and capable devs on Ladybird. I think they also know that. They do have a goal I don't think Theo appreciates, though, which I guess is fair enough. People care about different things. I for one like Ladybird and think that their goals make sense.
3:20 Theo talks about moving the tab bar to the right but couldn't find the setting, but at 1:44 I think he missed the "Tabs on the right" option when he right-clicked the tab bar. Seems like it's possible?
Mullvad Browser with a good uBlock Origin setup if you REALLY care about privacy. Librewolf with some or Firefox with a lot of settings changes is fine too.
Zen is based on Firefox. I switched to Zen from Firefox and LOVE the experience. Firefox Sync works flawlessly, there's a toolbar button you can add to view synced tabs. The browser is even based on the latest release of firefox and will update to new versions of firefox as soon as possible
Awesome that it's based on Firefox. I wouldn't even touch it if it has anything to do with chrome (I only use chrome sometimes for frontend dev in some extreme edgecases, but daily use always FF) Edit: also try it as default
I have been using this browser for few week and I totally impressed. It has all I want or need like split screen and the options (via., Themes) to get my browser look or do things that I want is dope. This browser is in Alpha stage but, it never feel like it. Its stability is just superb.
@@whoman0385 And without sacrificing side panel 😅 Anddd tab tiling. The only workaround for this in FF is wacky extension, that too hijacks side panel. Oh and it seems it also has workspaces, but it's in beta, didn't try it yet.
i got it after seeing this video and honestly im REALLY liking what im seeing so far, so clean and all the options it gives you are hands down some of my favorite things i've seen in a browser so far :3 thank you so much for showing this!
Isn't in browser proxy configuration something that's been around since the 90s? I thought that was a standard feature. I've never used it so i haven't watched things evolve over the years.
That’s not what he meant, he was saying that it’s a feature that isn’t really used by many people. So it’s nice that they decided to add it, even though not many people would use it
this might actually become my daily driver. as a teacher working from my personal laptop i always wanted to be able to easily switch between browser profiles without risking to mess up and use my personal account while teaching (don't want to accidentally show my own youtube account while looking for a lesson relevant youtube video for example)
6:00 "You cannot do a horizontal (in Arc)" yes you can, right click your split tabs in the sidebar and click "Covnert to Vertical Split View". (I think the names should be flipped, no idea why they call it Vertical Split, but it works.)
Even just 3 weeks after this has come out, the theme store is significantly larger, and every single theme has unique and useful applications. Excited to start daily driving it as i made the switch from chrome to edge over a year ago, and then from edge to firefox less than 3 momths ago
@@t3dotgg you can actually also use per browser proxy on both chromium and firefox browsers using extensions. However Firefox has it natively since early versions. It's very handy for cybersecurity research
it is call chrome.css because it is for the chrome, and chrome is named that because they did not want any chrome in the start of the project. chrome.css is older then chrome browser
also according to mozilla docs, "In a browser, the chrome is any visible aspect of a browser aside from the webpages themselves (e.g., toolbars, menu bar, tabs). This is not to be confused with the Google Chrome browser."
I think it would have been better if they used Servo and Rust (Like Versotile's Verso Browser is doing), but they are building their own rendering engine again (LibWeb), and also wasting time migrating from C++ to Swift.
Actually quite interesting, might try daily driving this for a little while and see how I feel about it. Also, you can move the tabs over to the right hand side! (right click on the empty space > check "Tabs on the right")
I immediately installed Zen to test it out as I was searching for a modern-looking Firefox alternative. One thing I immediately noticed is the immense ressource usage; especially when compared to Firefox/Chrome/Brave. With the same setup (extensions, search engine, bookmarks, etc.) I have about 2x the RAM usage (1.8GB) and way higher CPU usage (3%-10%). It is really fast but low-end systems like a RasPi could be easily bottlenecked here.
Google isn’t creative enough to name things, most products are named after the thing that it is (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, etc…) or picking technical terms (Pixel, Chrome, etc…).
they'd actually make a difference if they implemented APIs that firefox doesn't, e.g. file system acces (FSA) API. that would make me really interested as a web app dev.
Who wants a filesystem API in a browser?? 1 small slip up in that huge C++ codebase and a website can encrypt your whole drive or egress all your data to some foreign data center. At least you need a V8/Spidermonkey RCE 0-day and a sandbox bypass 0-day to do that with existing browsers. You would be creating a whole new attack surface for a feature like 4 people would use. This is also why I don't like WebUSB.
@@Name-gi8dr no. but then we'd have a browser that supports this and isn't chromium. firefox not implementing some APIs made me stick with chromium based browsers as a web dev.
Been trying it for about a week. I love it. It's all I wanted, a Firefox based Arc. Everything is based on Chromium already, we really needed this one.
@@aluisiofsjr Servo was released in 2012 and still isn't compatible with most modern websites. 5 years for a usable browser is a pipedream. The web is a disgusting mess of decades old cruft and broken standards.
At 3:30, the feature to set proxy is and has been available for a long time in Firefox. I remember using it back in 2011. It could be done in Chrome too but if I rember correctly it was not as straightforward as in Firefox.
@@curoviyxru Partly thanks to some myopic influencers undermining it, leaving it with no other choice. Our only hope it seems is Ladybird...time will tell
@@curoviyxru Partly funded by Google, because Google does not want Firefox to fail, nor does it was it to backrupt. Google needs Firefox, otherwise they will absolutely get hit with a monopoly suit. So saying "oops" kinda misses the point.
@@DrNoLife Considering Google recently got ruled against in courts for being a monopoly, it'll be interesting to see how their funding changes if at all. Some days it feels like a losing battle going up against a company that also influences a lot of standards. I'm also no Apple fan, but they've been feeling that exact pressure for years now with Safari. They can either not support new standards (PWA among other things) and let their own users down, or support the new standards and give another inch to Google at the cost of their own ecosystem. Everyone is subservient to the great chromium (and Google) in the end due to the market saturation. I'm really cheering for Firefox to survive all of this. I can be very cynical, but I do have hope.
it's kinda to be expected that the css in that browser is named chrome, considering that chrome was the term used to refer to everything that's in a browser, except for the browser pane that displays the website, meaning the term chrome refers to everything in the browser like the scroll bar the toolbar etc.
The fact that this browser is already available for all major platforms is already a step forward compared to arc
🌶
The developer is pretty much just one person. He compiled everything by himself
it's just Firefox with a custom skin
@@eeaahh I mean, isn't arc just chromium?
This, I love arc but windows implementation and lack of linux is certainly something...
At this rate, we need a new "day since new browser released" counter
browsers vs. js frameworks
Permanently Zero.
The only certainty is that Theo will try them all and claim that the newest one is also the best 😂
Just use the good old Firefox
at least its not another chromium based
A new browser, without Ai plastered all over their landing page, pretty interesting
in the day age of ai a new software not bombarding AI AI AI all over the place is such a breath of fresh air
Or crypto for that matter
It's a matter of when dev will need money
@@RiteshKumarPanda a new feature people can mention is "X doesn't have AI". we live in a society
amen
A Firefox-based browser like that is like a breath of fresh air
honestly, a clean firefox browser is what i was waiting for, i can finally switch from brave :D
Kid named LibreWolf: @@juushy
librewolf is just firefox
@@IN-pr3lwLibreWolf breaks so many websites for me though. Im using thorium at the moment and its very snappy
@@eeaahh hardened firefox yeah
I love that it is based on firefox, chromium browsers cover like 80% of web traffic, and google just being able to do whatever with it is scary
EXACTLY what I was thinking, I'm actually interested
Agreed, I've been a Firefox user since it was released, occasionally switching to Firefox derivatives because I dislike Chrome. This is probably my favourite so far.
Too bad firefox has compatibility issues with a lot of sites
YESSSS. Big win for those of us worried about Arc and MV3
Google deprecating MV2 extensions and making adblockers useless in newer versions of chrome makes it look like Google does whatever they want
Funny how Theo always shits on firefox, but many of the features he comments on here are actually firefox onse, and not specifically zen. I do agree this extra wrapper holds great potential though.
@@TayTayChan , the Firefox’s UI is really dated and cluttered. He is not wrong shitting on that…
i bet it's about having to fix code that works everywhere but not in firefox, while they refuse to align with others, because "that was the spec"
@@aluisiofsjryou can change it though
@@aluisiofsjr People are too obsessed with clean interfaces. Having features visible therefore easily accessible is a legitimate (and sometimes preferable) design philosophy. Browsers are complicated, and having the browser UI pretend it's simple wastes my time and mental effort.
@@aluisiofsjr You can change most of firefox UI. It's just html and css.
1 month later: i was wrong about firefox
LOL
Those connection settings have been around in firefox since the start i believe.
yep, it's a Firefox thing, not a Zen thing. Weird that he didn't know, hahah.
But I guess he did mention he's not a Firefox guy
Even goddamned IE had embedded proxy settings.
@@somerandompersonintheinternet he says im not a firefox guy, evidently thats because hes not used firefox in the past 10 years... firefox has had most of the features he was surprised about in zen for many many years now like the userChrome theming and profiles. Mozilla is also at fault for not pushing frontends for these cause clearly people find them cool and dont know about them
Funny how you get surpirsed on Firefox features existing for decades (eg per browser proxy settings)
I thought the same thing.
He's "not a firefox guy" because he hasn't used it at all.
Similar thought when he said chrome.css being named after google chrome like userchrome has not existed for years
When will firefox get native profile management though? Like chrome, safari and edge does?
@@andreas.111 it has, but not pushed to the front. You can somehow open the profile chooser by some command line argument
Also switching tabs with scroll is in firefox too
"their biggest hurdle is that they're using firefox as the base instead of chromium"
yeahhh we don't need anymore chromium based browsers and give google even more influence than they already have over the web. he really needs to legitimately try and daily drive firefox.
I'd back this sentiment more if Firefox didn't basically rubber stamp 97% of what Google proposes for the web. Apple does that, too. That's why Ladybird is so exciting.
I know I’m in the minority, but I _wouldn’t_ use it if it were Chromium. (Been dailying it for a couple of weeks. Works great!)
Or the new Ladybird browser, which is truly independent, when it's finally ready for release.
@@torspedia Oh, absolutely! But that's pretty far from something to daily today. And I think it's better for the health of the web to use Gecko now (while keeping an eye on things like Ladybird), than to use Blink/Chromium while waiting for something perfect.
@@torspediaLadybird sounds like a great thing coming to the web.
Wake up babe
New browser just dropped
"Let me sleep for five minutes, will you?"
"Go back to bed. Firefox is still king."
@@trappedcat3615 "Firefox" 😂
Kingfox
Kingfox FTW
A lot of those “new” features, like tab scrolling, have been possible in FF. The problem for FF has been the defaults, resistance to changing them, and the difficulty of configuring these customizations. What looks promising about Zen is that the defaults are better out of the box + there looks to be a clear and easy way to share these customizations through their “themes”. I think that paving the road for the community to explore customizations is going to be Zen’s killer feature. If they can continue to expose more and more of FF’s internals in a user friendly way, their future will be bright.
Tab Tiling and Vertical Bar definitely are not possible in FF tho. Users were begging for it for years, and Firefox just recently decided it should try vertical tabs in nightly. Dunno if this is based on that code, as last time I used it, things *weren't* working right, to say the least.
@@kaedriz yup, that’s why I said “a lot” and not all 😉
@@HoYinCheng Well, sorry if I interpreted it wrong, but I felt that you underplayed the effort of zen team, making it sound like it was "just" another user.js modification. chrome.css store like system could be even implemented externally through importing css files, but there is a worry about style conflicts, I'm curious how they tackle this if they allow community-curated styles, not just internal ones.
@@kaedriz I didn’t intend to underplay those changes. I was attempting to focus on and highlight an aspect of the browser that I think they are doing right but that I haven’t seen anyone, this video included, calling out as what I think can be their biggest game changer. The software that I see a parallel to is Obsidian. It did a lot of unique and great things, but what ended up being their killer feature was community plugins. I’d love to see encouragement of this because I think it would uniquely set them apart. Apologies if my attempt to focus on that made it sound like I was downplaying them. My default mode is to read comments in the most positive possible interpretation (HN etiquette) and tend to write assuming that.
exactly this. switched from chrome to FF because of the mv3 changes, and holy fk, having to change so much sht in config/chrome.css is just really sad. if FF is looking for more users coming from chrome, they need to change these defaults
Firefox purist here, but anything that gives folks more options for avoiding Chrome and Safari is a win.
Hey at least Safari isn’t based on Chromium. So it gets a +1 for that.
Cool, a browser not using chromium for once!
Also: i really hope ladybird project actually does work and we finally get a fully FOSS and independent browser. It's crazy we have monopolies in every single aspect of the fucking web
Don't forget about Servo!
@@gljames24 servo being much better alternative
@@gljames24 you mean Verso
@@gljames24 Servo is intended for research, not general use, so it doesn't really count. Its advancements are meant to be extracted and merged into other browsers, not make it a competitor :Ü™
@@ClimateChangeDoesntBargainVerso is the browser that uses the Servo web engine.
"new browser" is the new "new javascript framework"
new reskin of firefox or chromium
I doubt the average user would even care
firefox is adding vertical tabs in nightly builds too so this is the meta now i guess
In retrospect it's the obvious choice. The screen is wide than it's tall, so why are/were we spending our screen real estate in such a poor way
@@modernkennnern But we already have the titlebar, most tab bars don't extend past this anyway so vertical tabs doesn't actually save any screen space
@@myogg I usually prefer vertical tabs because it's easier to use when you have more than 5 tabs open, past that it gets too much confusing
@@myogg You are making a Windows assumption, On Linux, which is somewhat popular among FF users, you certainly are not guaranteed to have Title bar. In Gnome maybe, in most of KDE too (but you can hide that on maximized), but in tiling desktops, you certainly don't have title bars.
And adding onto your actual argument, window controls can, and some themes already do something like this, be moved to address bar, like Zen does it even.
@@kaedriz That's me!!! I ditched my title bars ages ago! Shortcuts FTW!
Firefox multi-account containers is the best thing about Firefox that I haven't seen in other browsers. Works in Zen too it seems.
Its the only reason I can't switch to anything else
for realll
yes
I might be wrong, but there's a way of having that in Arc, called profiles
@@ivanv6862 That's different. Firefox also has profiles, but multi-account container allows simultaneous independent sessions within a profile. And the different sessions are attached per tab rather than per window/per process.
Theo must have never seen Firefox Containers if he thinks workspaces have to be separate windows. You can have two tabs immediately next to each other in completely different containers. MUCH more useful than Chrome and even Arc's implementation imo
You notice that he has never used Firefox when he is glorifying every standard feature in Firefox because he doesn't know that it's actually Firefox.
The Proxy thing is directly from Firefox, same ui btw
yeah and existes in other browsers nothing new
@@GreatTaiwanit's like among of the browsers that don't use Chromium. A lot of browsers like Chrome use Chromium!
0:48 FLASHBANG WARNING!!
man😂 underrated comment
🤣🤣🤣
Light mode always catching strays 😭 it’s so pretty thoooo
Saw this right when it happened..
8:04 - Real eye-bleach after few minutes of dark mode in the night
JUst looking at the fact that it won't ship any AI-based-thingy-thing it sort of feels the right direction in what a browser should be/have. Focusing on simplicity, UX, performance and security should be the de-facto way of creating software and I feel like trying Zen out for all of that. Huge plus for being based on Firefox, which has always been my favorite browser so far.
True, if a product doesn't have AI displayed in its homepage, then I'm definitely interested. But I think it's going to have some AI in the future, as Firefox is going that path in the nightly, but at least these are mostly local LLMs.
@@kaedriz AI should be in search engine, not in browser. For tabs and history search some kind of fuzzy finder is enough
@@kaedriz the dev said he has NO PLANS for AI and they will most likely remove AI features if Firefox releases them
First thought was please be a Firefox fork, didn't disappoint!
they may call it a fork but i think it's gonna be more like a wrapper, not touching the engine parts but just the chrome parts (yes, thats what the ui parts are called, ironically)
@@gr-lf9ulChrome was named that way, because they tried to minimize the chrome and put the website front and center.
@@gr-lf9ul all firefox forks only change icon. So wrapper is a lot.
I AM ZENNING SO HARD RIGHT NOW IM GONNA DAILY DRIVE IT (yes you should daily drive it for a bit. Btw i've done horizontal splitting on arc browser on windows)
Zen is fantastic, I've been using it for a few months, it has taken the place of my primary browser and I do not see myself switching
Uh Theo, the proxy thing is part of base Firefox.
I've switched too and it's great. The only major downside i see right now is the high usage of RAM even with just around 5 tabs open. Around 40% of 16 GB.
been playing with this for the day, it feels REALLY nice. Gonna main it for the next week and see how it goes. After Arc for Windows completely fell flat for me, it feels good to have a nice browser on windows for once lol
The thing about Ladybird is that "reinventing things for the sake of it" is literally the premise (of it and SerenityOS), but you're complaining as if they're not aware of it. Which... considering Ladybird's marketing, yeah, maybe.
It might be considered a waste of time, but it's _their_ time they're spending. They do need to make it clear though.
The hype behind Ladybird is there precisely because they're not Firefox based or Chromium based. It's the only 100% independent browser that has the potential to be actually viable. Anything that gets us away from Google and Mozilla (considering how shaky their foundation is and how slimy they're getting) is a net positive.
@@mistervallus185 No he just understands building production ready software
@@spht9ng And the guy who single-handedly built an OS, userland and an awesome community from scratch doesn't? Why would anyone shit on an volunteer effort to build something, even if you think they are just doing it out of a principle? There is no scenario in which having a competing implementation is a net negative.
I think it would have been better if they used Servo and Rust (Like Versotile's Verso Browser is doing), but they are building their own rendering engine again (LibWeb), and also wasting time migrating from C++ to Swift.
@@spht9ng Iirc, there are plenty of very experienced and capable devs on Ladybird. I think they also know that. They do have a goal I don't think Theo appreciates, though, which I guess is fair enough. People care about different things. I for one like Ladybird and think that their goals make sense.
3:20 Theo talks about moving the tab bar to the right but couldn't find the setting, but at 1:44 I think he missed the "Tabs on the right" option when he right-clicked the tab bar. Seems like it's possible?
Browser race! I'm not even sure what to use, i'm still on Firefox.
have you tried firefox nighly? It has sidebar now and with conex extension, it's just arc spaces.
stick to firefox
Mullvad Browser with a good uBlock Origin setup if you REALLY care about privacy. Librewolf with some or Firefox with a lot of settings changes is fine too.
Firefox is excellent with uBlock
Zen is based on Firefox.
I switched to Zen from Firefox and LOVE the experience.
Firefox Sync works flawlessly, there's a toolbar button you can add to view synced tabs.
The browser is even based on the latest release of firefox and will update to new versions of firefox as soon as possible
3:30 this is literally the same window as firefox has 🤣
yeah, i guess this is really nice to have in this new cool browser 🤣
I've been using Firefox and looking into Arc, but now I might test Zen. Thank you
3:29 pretty sure, that's just a default Firefox feature.
He's just hating on Firefox without using it enough
I am sure almost all popular browsers have this feature
@@kawali6394 not chromium. It just takes you to system wide proxy settings.
I was really surprised when I found out this wasn't a thing in chrome.
While you're at it, you'll discover the AWESOME world of tab containers in Firefox-based browsers.
I'm surprised how full-featured this looks already. Definitely going to check Zen out.
Awesome that it's based on Firefox. I wouldn't even touch it if it has anything to do with chrome (I only use chrome sometimes for frontend dev in some extreme edgecases, but daily use always FF)
Edit: also try it as default
I'm typing this from the Zen browser itself. Can't believe I'm more ahead on a new web technology than Theo! By um 3 days!
I have been using this browser for few week and I totally impressed. It has all I want or need like split screen and the options (via., Themes) to get my browser look or do things that I want is dope. This browser is in Alpha stage but, it never feel like it. Its stability is just superb.
So basically it's Firefox with Sidebery (if it even can do what Sidebery can, interacting with containers), better privacy defaults and less clutter?
Didn't know that addon. Thx.
that but all out of the box and more beautiful
@@whoman0385 And without sacrificing side panel 😅 Anddd tab tiling. The only workaround for this in FF is wacky extension, that too hijacks side panel. Oh and it seems it also has workspaces, but it's in beta, didn't try it yet.
I actually like the Web Panel on this one. It feels super nice, even compared to the previous Firefox forks I used! (Pulse, then Mercury, then Floorp)
Yep. It looks really nice but Sideberry already does 99% of that.
i got it after seeing this video and honestly im REALLY liking what im seeing so far, so clean and all the options it gives you are hands down some of my favorite things i've seen in a browser so far :3 thank you so much for showing this!
Isn't in browser proxy configuration something that's been around since the 90s? I thought that was a standard feature. I've never used it so i haven't watched things evolve over the years.
That’s not what he meant, he was saying that it’s a feature that isn’t really used by many people. So it’s nice that they decided to add it, even though not many people would use it
@@oSpam Yeah, he misspoke. I saw his comment after I made this one.
this might actually become my daily driver. as a teacher working from my personal laptop i always wanted to be able to easily switch between browser profiles without risking to mess up and use my personal account while teaching (don't want to accidentally show my own youtube account while looking for a lesson relevant youtube video for example)
6:00 "You cannot do a horizontal (in Arc)" yes you can, right click your split tabs in the sidebar and click "Covnert to Vertical Split View".
(I think the names should be flipped, no idea why they call it Vertical Split, but it works.)
true, the only limitation is you can't combine multiple types of splits, it's either vertical or horizontal
Even just 3 weeks after this has come out, the theme store is significantly larger, and every single theme has unique and useful applications.
Excited to start daily driving it as i made the switch from chrome to edge over a year ago, and then from edge to firefox less than 3 momths ago
Stream idea:- Make a theme for zen according to you taste
theme: adds or removes border-radius with css
theo: the way you can easily fundamentally change your browser is huge!! this is awesome!
bro
proxy being a niche feature? i feel like i've seen this in many browsers... 🤔
niche as in not many user need it, not as in "not many browsers support it"
@@t3dotggah, that makes sense.
@@t3dotgg you can actually also use per browser proxy on both chromium and firefox browsers using extensions. However Firefox has it natively since early versions. It's very handy for cybersecurity research
I've only seen it on firefox based browsers. Other browsers redirect to the OS's proxy settings.
Holy shit. This changes everything.
And respect for Theo for supporting the project.
This video aged well, arc is discontinued. Zen ftw
As an arc user, that theme store and hide the url bar sold me, gotta try installing it tomorrow
Bro is always hyped about everything 😂
3:30, also Firefox doesn't use the certificates from macOS, Linux or Windows, it uses it's own. Which is from a security standpoint, very good.
it actually looks pretty cool. i wanted arc to be on linux, but it's not, so I'm super excited for this one
I just downloaded it to try it out and I gotta say I love how clean and neat everything is. It's so well designed
Been using zen browser and it’s honestly great. It’s a much more efficient arc
You can get vertical split in Arc by dragging another tab to the top or bottom of the tab you're currently on :)
it is call chrome.css because it is for the chrome, and chrome is named that because they did not want any chrome in the start of the project.
chrome.css is older then chrome browser
also according to mozilla docs, "In a browser, the chrome is any visible aspect of a browser aside from the webpages themselves (e.g., toolbars, menu bar, tabs). This is not to be confused with the Google Chrome browser."
Based on Firefox? now that's a browser I could actually use!
3:22 Of course you can.
One thing I really love about it is being able to set a shortcut for the settings page.
3:28 Assuming you were taking the proxy thing as a Zen feature rather than a Firefox feature, you probably don't use Firefox as default
Using FF as default considered as selfharm by World Health Organization
This actually feels like waterfox if it offered the layout experience of arc... Interesting stuff.
Might use this for my personal PC.
06:00 you can do horizontal splits in arc btw
I'm currently using this browser right after watching your video, and I must admit, that you're right - it's really cool
I kept my macbook for Arc. Now I finally will switch fully to Linux.
3:42 the proxy stuff is a vanilla firefox feature.
Firefox was missing "group tabs".
Now i will use workspaces for that 🙂.
Also we have containers💫... yet to find an usecase for this.
Well done review of the browser, and that too improvised at that! Zen looks promising.
I loved Arc, but tabs in the sidebar makes web pages so small on a 13 inch laptop. Zen's solution for sure resolves that
That's right, it is solved with the "minimal sidebar" theme
Gonna download just for the grid layout. So hype!
Bro, you didn't have to take personally the hate you got in the Ladybird video 😅, your attacks to ladybird in this video feel so childish.
I can hear Ladybird is crying
I think it would have been better if they used Servo and Rust (Like Versotile's Verso Browser is doing), but they are building their own rendering engine again (LibWeb), and also wasting time migrating from C++ to Swift.
The right sidebar thing is available as a zen mod
the zen team - its just one guy btw!
Thanks for covering this, the exact kinda thing I think the tech world needs!!!!
Zen + VS Code + Obsidian sounds to me like an awesome toolset for development and research
Replace VSCode with VSCodium and I am right there with you.
And obsidian replaced with Affine
@@LovecraftianGodsKiller
@@Extropyst Affine user detected
Zed, not vscode
anything but vscode please
Actually quite interesting, might try daily driving this for a little while and see how I feel about it.
Also, you can move the tabs over to the right hand side! (right click on the empty space > check "Tabs on the right")
15:41 Agreed and I daily drive Firefox. It's uglier and slower than pretty much any Chromium browser.
I hope they'll finally add support for other languages in the tag
"Chrome" is the name of the border/window around the browser. That's where Chrome got it's name.
edit: Ok you caught that lol
Haha this definitely made me laugh and I was surprised you wasn't aware of it
I immediately installed Zen to test it out as I was searching for a modern-looking Firefox alternative. One thing I immediately noticed is the immense ressource usage; especially when compared to Firefox/Chrome/Brave. With the same setup (extensions, search engine, bookmarks, etc.) I have about 2x the RAM usage (1.8GB) and way higher CPU usage (3%-10%). It is really fast but low-end systems like a RasPi could be easily bottlenecked here.
Time to compile my new browser on gentoo linux
*it's spelled Arch, btw
I just ported their config to my Firefox, loving it
Google isn’t creative enough to name things, most products are named after the thing that it is (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, etc…) or picking technical terms (Pixel, Chrome, etc…).
Someone probably already mentioned this but yes, you CAN actually do horizontal splits in Arc.
they'd actually make a difference if they implemented APIs that firefox doesn't, e.g. file system acces (FSA) API. that would make me really interested as a web app dev.
nobody would use it lol, you need adoption for that
@@filipkociswdym? it's in chromium browsers.
Who wants a filesystem API in a browser?? 1 small slip up in that huge C++ codebase and a website can encrypt your whole drive or egress all your data to some foreign data center. At least you need a V8/Spidermonkey RCE 0-day and a sandbox bypass 0-day to do that with existing browsers. You would be creating a whole new attack surface for a feature like 4 people would use. This is also why I don't like WebUSB.
That is a terrible idea to stray away from mainstream support.
What are you going to do? Tell every user to use this specific browser?
@@Name-gi8dr no. but then we'd have a browser that supports this and isn't chromium. firefox not implementing some APIs made me stick with chromium based browsers as a web dev.
it's just arc browser but support for linux! awesome
you've made me adopt so many new technologies, zen, zed, supermaven, probably more stuff too
2:21 Not even a honourable mention for Vivaldi 😿
I’m a happy Vivaldi user. Interested in this for some of the same reason, but not a huge fan of Mozilla/gecko, particularly as a developer
@@AvanaVana Totally Valid
After the announcement that Arc will kinda stop with development I think this is the best time for you to switch
I love the Arc UI and absolutely hate that I can’t use arc on Linux.
Zen is the future.
"Anything I don't like(understand) is stupid" - Theo, 2024
“This is why vs code won” says the reason people love neovim.
lol, yeah, thought the same thing when he said it. Neovim is the GOAT for customization capability for sure
@@somerandompersonintheinternet Customization should not be painfull and should not require user to learn yet another programming language.
Been trying it for about a week. I love it. It's all I wanted, a Firefox based Arc.
Everything is based on Chromium already, we really needed this one.
I'm instantly switching from Firefox to Zen. I've been a Firefox user for 15 years now, never looked back.
I clicked on this video expecting some new fancy browser I wouldn't really care about but this is actually cool I want to try this out
Zen for linux came faster than arc for linux lmao
FYI for the gatekeeper warning - you can just right click -> open and then you’ll get the open anyway option
so we take a massive dump on ladybird for doing things from scratch, but we clap like seals when a fancy firefox skin is released?
@@Quantum_Nebula , Ladybird is 5 years minimum to be released to the public, right?
@@aluisiofsjryes
>its bad that everything is either chrimium or firefox fork
>noo are you stupid why are you making a browser that is not chromium or firefox fork
@@aluisiofsjr Servo was released in 2012 and still isn't compatible with most modern websites. 5 years for a usable browser is a pipedream. The web is a disgusting mess of decades old cruft and broken standards.
Yea idk how to feel about this, seems pretty backwards to me
At 3:30, the feature to set proxy is and has been available for a long time in Firefox. I remember using it back in 2011. It could be done in Chrome too but if I rember correctly it was not as straightforward as in Firefox.
Does he know that FF is the ONLY open-source browser that shields us from potential monopolistic dystopia?
That's kinda not what Theo cares for a browser...
that is also funded by Google... oops...
@@curoviyxru Partly thanks to some myopic influencers undermining it, leaving it with no other choice. Our only hope it seems is Ladybird...time will tell
@@curoviyxru Partly funded by Google, because Google does not want Firefox to fail, nor does it was it to backrupt. Google needs Firefox, otherwise they will absolutely get hit with a monopoly suit. So saying "oops" kinda misses the point.
@@DrNoLife Considering Google recently got ruled against in courts for being a monopoly, it'll be interesting to see how their funding changes if at all. Some days it feels like a losing battle going up against a company that also influences a lot of standards.
I'm also no Apple fan, but they've been feeling that exact pressure for years now with Safari. They can either not support new standards (PWA among other things) and let their own users down, or support the new standards and give another inch to Google at the cost of their own ecosystem. Everyone is subservient to the great chromium (and Google) in the end due to the market saturation.
I'm really cheering for Firefox to survive all of this. I can be very cynical, but I do have hope.
it's kinda to be expected that the css in that browser is named chrome, considering that chrome was the term used to refer to everything that's in a browser, except for the browser pane that displays the website, meaning the term chrome refers to everything in the browser like the scroll bar the toolbar etc.
Firefox Containers makes your workspaces in one window
Which is an advantage, but it can be schizophrenic. Having workspaces to organize sessions is also something that adds up.