Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there’s little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.
Firefox vertical tabs are lackluster though, you don’t have pinned and essential tabs on FF, and you also miss out on Glance (the pop out link feature), basically the main features it copied from Arc. Honestly it’s been very stable for me, and it’s matured enough that I’d recommend giving it another shot.
You absolutely do have pinned tabs on FF. They go double column when you shrink down the sidebar, too, which I like. And they work with tab groups. Can’t believe those took so long to steal from Chrome. Did support for groups get integrated into Zen as well? That’s probably my line in the sand these days.
I was interested in the Glance concept, but I did not love the implementation. It was hard to tell when you were inside a Glance tab and I ended up struggling to deploy those into a persistent tab if I wanted to keep them for later. The idea was intriguing, but I never clicked with the details of the UX. It always took a little bit more thinking to work around than just… right clicking into new tab, I guess.
Why do people want vertical tabs? It feels as if it just takes up more space, and my muscle memory after all these years makes me move to the top. I always go back to horizontal tabs after using vertical tabs for a day.
because when you have more than 8 tabs open on a horizontal tab row, the tab handles start to become narrower and tab titles become unreadable and almost useless. with vertical tabs tab titles can be as long as you see fit, and the tab title does not take away space from other tab handles so more can fit. essentially its more space efficient I think.
but I don’t use it because my firefox theme breaks down when I set up vertical tabs, and everything will be white, even though I don’t even use userchrome customizations
Makes sense. The sites I am using most probably have not adopted the new style yet. And like I said, the hardest part is the muscle memory of looking at the top for my tabs and moving my mouse to the top to select a tab.
Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.
i would like to move from zen to firefox, but as of right now i’m somewhat unhappy with the vertical tabs in firefox. i’ll keep an eye on them though and make the switch once they got some more features (like only appearing when mousing to the left edge of the window and staying entirely hidden otherwise)
You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it’d take me longer to adapt to that when moving back from Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it’s pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.
I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I’m quite happy with it now. I’d have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn’t just use the engine, but it’s also hooked up to Firefox’s account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn’t seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?
well, i don’t know the last state you know, but they added a floating search bar, which is pretty, but not beneficial beyond that i think. they added a default shortcut for copying the current webaddress which i sorely miss on mullvad.
besides i dont think they added any major features i would’ve noticed, but it feels like a very stable experience atm, both on linux and macos.
Zen browser is basically FireFox made to look like Arc
Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there’s little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.
Firefox vertical tabs are lackluster though, you don’t have pinned and essential tabs on FF, and you also miss out on Glance (the pop out link feature), basically the main features it copied from Arc. Honestly it’s been very stable for me, and it’s matured enough that I’d recommend giving it another shot.
You absolutely do have pinned tabs on FF. They go double column when you shrink down the sidebar, too, which I like. And they work with tab groups. Can’t believe those took so long to steal from Chrome. Did support for groups get integrated into Zen as well? That’s probably my line in the sand these days.
I was interested in the Glance concept, but I did not love the implementation. It was hard to tell when you were inside a Glance tab and I ended up struggling to deploy those into a persistent tab if I wanted to keep them for later. The idea was intriguing, but I never clicked with the details of the UX. It always took a little bit more thinking to work around than just… right clicking into new tab, I guess.
I really like the split view in Zen. I wish it supported drag and dropping links across pages but it’s still handy.
Why do people want vertical tabs? It feels as if it just takes up more space, and my muscle memory after all these years makes me move to the top. I always go back to horizontal tabs after using vertical tabs for a day.
because when you have more than 8 tabs open on a horizontal tab row, the tab handles start to become narrower and tab titles become unreadable and almost useless. with vertical tabs tab titles can be as long as you see fit, and the tab title does not take away space from other tab handles so more can fit. essentially its more space efficient I think.
but I don’t use it because my firefox theme breaks down when I set up vertical tabs, and everything will be white, even though I don’t even use userchrome customizations
I prefer the overview I get with them. I’m on an ultrawide monitor so it’s not like I’m sacrificing horizontal space either.
Yeah, on a widescreen or 4K, I can see the appeal.
Because web content is increasingly mobile and vertical-oriented. So the horizontal space is usually empty anyway.
Sometimes new things take time to get used to but if you try it for more than a single day you may find that you like it.
Makes sense. The sites I am using most probably have not adopted the new style yet. And like I said, the hardest part is the muscle memory of looking at the top for my tabs and moving my mouse to the top to select a tab.
Zen is a lot more than just vertical tabs. And I have never run into any “pains and bugs”.
Same. I’ve been using it daily for the best part of a year and it’s been pretty pleasant to use throughout.
Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.
i would like to move from zen to firefox, but as of right now i’m somewhat unhappy with the vertical tabs in firefox. i’ll keep an eye on them though and make the switch once they got some more features (like only appearing when mousing to the left edge of the window and staying entirely hidden otherwise)
You should try the Shimmer userchrome tweaks along with the Sideberry extension. With both of them it’s even better than Zen IMO.
thanks a lot, i’ll check them out!
You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it’d take me longer to adapt to that when moving back from Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it’s pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.
I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I’m quite happy with it now. I’d have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn’t just use the engine, but it’s also hooked up to Firefox’s account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn’t seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?
well, i don’t know the last state you know, but they added a floating search bar, which is pretty, but not beneficial beyond that i think. they added a default shortcut for copying the current webaddress which i sorely miss on mullvad. besides i dont think they added any major features i would’ve noticed, but it feels like a very stable experience atm, both on linux and macos.
Zen makes something like 84 external connections, which is around double what even Edge makes (and Microsoft has basically become a malware company).
This was patched, and the vast majority were just fetching thumbnails.