The Zen Browser
Today, Hund asked if anyone had tried the new browser, Zen. I remembered hearing about Zen, but I think at the time it wasn’t available. Or maybe it was, but that’s the excuse I’m giving myself now for not trying it then. Regardless, I hadn’t tried it but now seemed like the perfect time to give it a spin.
So, disclaimers first. I use Vivaldi as my primary browser. I have for quite a while, and I’m pretty dedicated to it. Vivaldi has a lot (a lot) of features. In my opinion, it’s the browser to beat in the browser market. It’s not the one with the most market share, but there’s rarely a feature I run across that Vivaldi doesn’t have. All this to say, when I tested Zen I’m putting it up against Vivaldi as my metric.
First thing, installation. I didn’t really do it. There’s a “Portable” version I used to test it. There’s a portable version available for both Windows and for Linux. I tried them both and they’re pretty much the same, as you’d expect. Since I didn’t do the installation, the whole installation was a snap. Just zunzip2 for Linux, unzip for Windows, and run the executable. The installation is around 240MB, and both run smoothly on my system.
Right out of the gate, this isn’t a fair comparison since I’m running Vivaldi 6.8.3381.55 (stable), and Zen is an alpha version. It’s just not going to be the same. I think everybody can understand that.
First off, Zen looks good. Its got a very simple, almost Spartan, UI. Tabs are aligned vertically along the left and the top is dominated almost exclusively by the address bar. There’s a back, forward, and refresh button on the far left. I also used the customizability features of Zen to add a Home button because I like having one. On the right you get your extension manager icon and a hamburger menu (…) to access Zen’s menu. Oh, and of course the min/max/close buttons. The bottom left has icons for settings, history, favorites, sidebar, and a button with two arrows going in opposite directions that it took me some time to figure out just widens the bar on the left so you can see tab titles. The corners are rounded and at least in dark mode it was a nice look.
The first thing that I ran into that I found odd was there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to close a tab? At least in the default view. If you expand the tab panel you get an X to close the tab, but if you have it in icon view, you have to right click on the tab and choose the close tab option. There’s also a > at the bottom of the tab icon row that brings up a small menu. That menu has an X for each tab and actually relists all the tabs you have open. This seemed a bit weird to me. There’s also a search option that lets you quickly find tabs if you’ve lost one. I generally have dozens if not hundreds of tabs open, so this can be a nice feature for me. It did take me a bit of time to figure out the tab you’ve got on screen at the time won’t show up in search results. That makes sense, sorta.
Zen is a Firefox based browser, and in my opinion it looks nicer than Firefox. It also uses Firefox extensions, so out of the gate there’s that going for you. Strangely, I still couldn’t get it to block ads as well as Vivaldi, even with no addons. I installed several adblocks out of the Firefox store and the ads still got through that I never even know where there in Vivaldi. Vivaldi has built in ad protection, and apparently it’s really, really good.
So, is it usable? Absolutely. I browsed around the web for around an hour and despite its Alpha status I didn’t have a single crash. Everything rendered just as you’d expect. No memory issues. If you’re looking for a really pretty Firefox, this might be a good option for you. The tabs on the left took a bit of getting used to for me, but I could configure Vivaldi to do it that way too, so I think that’s just more how comfortable I am with my normal workflow. They do say you can make Zen browser look and feel the way you like, but that seems to be more about color pallet than anything else. There’s no feature to move the tab bar to the top for example.
Should you try it? With a portable option, I don’t see why not. It could be right up your alley. Personally speaking, I’m sticking to Vivaldi, but I think that was a given from the start. Still, I might keep Zen around for times I sometimes switch over to Firefox for something, or just to have a usable third option.
Day 7 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.
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