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/desktop&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)

  • beleza pura
    2•2 days ago

    you’re confusing importance with complexity

    openssl is a vital part of the web, but it is a small tool

    pale moon leverages the hundreds of thousands of person-hours put into firefox up until the fork. the work they put on their original code is negligible in comparison

    there is literally no project led by unpaid volunteers that’s able to output the amount of work necessary to maintain a browser and keep it up to date with web standards, let alone add new features

    • @[email protected]
      0•2 days ago

      openssl is a vital part of the web, but it is a small tool

      You consider 61.7MB of source code “small”? (That’s for openssl 3.3.2, and may not include some rust code that isn’t in the gzipped main code package.) I think maybe you need to recalibrate a bit.

        • @[email protected]
          0•2 days ago

          You just said “large”. I would consider any project with 10MB or more of source “large”. Firefox is certainly large by that standard, but so is openssl. If your standard for “large” is “has at least as much code as Firefox”, then according to you, the Linux kernel is a small project.