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)

  • canadaduane@lemmy.caEnglish
    392·
    3 days ago

    There is a certain strain of open source development that is nearly anti-marketing, as far as I can tell. They choose names like “gimp”, “git”, “frotz”, “borg”, “pooch”, “butt”, “slurm”, “mutt”, “snort”, and “floorp”.

    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
      7·
      2 days ago

      I love this, we should maintain a list of these, it’s like that “Pokémon or web technology?” thing

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
      13·
      3 days ago

      At least “git” and “mutt” don’t feel ridiculous when being pronounced.

      The rest are pushing it, but they fill in specific niches that no other tool in their fields can provide, or at least on par with others in their fields.

      The same cannot be said about floorp. It sounds ridiculous on your tongue, it looks ridiculous spelled out on the screen, it is just another Firefox fork.