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)
While I’ve tried both, I am not sensitive to any of these trends. I’m just glad to see some alternatives that can fit anyone needs. That’s the power of the open-source.
Although I understand the reasoning beyond the language used in this post, I’m sad to read that hardened privacy is considered a power user thing.
What’s really sad is the fact you need to make a bunch of convenience tradeoffs and go well out of your way for improved privacy, and on a browser that already has a lot of built-in features for privacy. And a downside of using a Firefox fork is not getting the latest Firefox updates ASAP, you have to wait for the fork to update. It goes to show how privacy-invasive the web is.