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)

  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    28 days ago

    What I’d really like is LibreWolf level privacy protection whilst the browser is running but that allows me to retain cache, history etc but also encrypts everything locally when the browser is closed and is password protected and only decrypts everything when the password is entered.

    • aksdb@lemmy.world
      4·
      27 days ago

      Is that really a relevent attack vector in your day to day use, that full disk encryption wouldn’t cover? My browser is rarely closed when I am on the PC, so it would be accessible (because unlocked).

    • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      27 days ago

      with linux and kde you could create an encrypted kde vault that’s mounted to your librewolf profile folder (and you can change librewolf settings to save history, cache, etc.)

      if you don’t want to use kde, it uses cryfs in the background, which has a cli tool as well. unmount the volume after using the browser and profit i guess, though i do agree with the other commenter that this doesn’t make much sense in my head.