My Thoughts on the Zen Browser
My Thoughts on the Zen Browser
My thoughts and first impressions of the Zen Browser!
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Nixpkgs has been working on packaging it for more than 6 months now. That is a damning timeframe for both Zen and nixpkgs in IMO equal parts. In Zen’s case, that means that they are packaging their app in a very unconventional way and lagging with security updates, breaking standards (which usually means they are amateurs). In nixpkgs case, that means nixpkgs needs better
buildMozillaMachsupport.
I used it in an appImage and came away unimpressed. Using it in a tiling WM, I loved the minimalism….but I just wish it had better security and rendered webpages better. On Brave, websites literally look sharper than on Zen.
Edit: most of my concerns were addressed by the dev themself just down the page a bit.
That comment about their security updates is a couple of months old. Zen has made significant changes to how they handle releases to stay up to date with Firefox, some of which were mentioned in the thread.
The Nix package is functional. Nixpkgs sometimes chooses not to add beta software that is receiving very frequent updates, especially if the package takes a lot of resources to build. In those cases, it makes more sense for the package to be maintained outside Nixpkgs for the time being. NixOS users can get Zen from this Flake, which patches the official binary. COSMIC Desktop is another example of this.
Pages not looking sharp sounds like it's probably a font or scaling issue.
Thanks for the update. I did read down the page and saw that. The dev looked really receptive, cooperative, and pro about it.
Agreed. I doubt he expected the project to be anywhere near this popular considering how many Firefox forks there are, and he's been doing a great job keeping up with everything that popularity comes with.
Yeah, that's always my first concern with forks like this. I care a lot more about security updates than UX.
I used to use Mull on Android, but then the dev abandoned it and left me open to security vulnerabilities, so now I'm back on Fennec, which seems to stay updated. If Zen can stay patched, ideally in a largely automated fashion, maybe I'll give it a shot.