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/desktop&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)
Currently using Floorp as my default browser after using Librewolf for quite a while. I tried using Zen Browser and I thought I might be won over. However, I don’t know if I’ve just spent more time customizing Floorp, and haven’t explored Zen Brower’s customization options, but they give me slightly similar, but also fairly different vibes. Maybe I ought to give it another spin and refine my thoughts.
As far as my last go at it though, Zen and Floorp gave me similar, but also fairly different vibes. Zen is more sleek minimalism in vibes, Floorp is more maximalist. With the current (??) design trends and fashion turning towards sleek minimalism, Zen kinda has the upper hand here.
And, yeah! Floorp a name that isn’t doing it any favors. Kinda makes it memorable tho in a weird kind of way.