Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana The Zen Browser is a new effort to modernize web browsing by bringing tiling, workspaces, and so on – and it's blissfully free of Google code. Zen is a new web browser that's still in the relatively early stages of development. Since we have been testing it, it's gone from alpha 27 to 1.0.0-a.32, and during that time, it's …
Like Linux distros revived by children, this is all very well ... but what are the chances that Zen Browser will be around in two years? Five years? However frustrating I occasionally find Chrome and however tempted I would be by a version of Firefox that worked, I'm certainly not interested in jumping ship to something which is unlikely to be around for long. I'm an "LTS" sort of person.
a version of Firefox that worked,
I've heard a few people making disparaging comments towards Firefox on the forums. I've used FF as my browser of choice for years on both Windows and Linux boxen, and not really had any problems with it. Not trolling, just genuinely curious....what is it about FF that makes it problematic?
"Liam Proven" wrote:
Zoom works fine.
There have definitely been versions of FF that would not zoom a page. I've been frustrated by that on a number of occasions. In the past it was like that for FF and almost all its forks for quite a while.
In recent times on the Android platform, Firefox Focus is one example where there is no still no obvious way to make this work. Whereas FF forks like Fennec and Mull can.
But why Mozilla devs are so attached to the un-zoomable mode to make it the default (and only put an override for this in the "Accessibility" menu) is pretty strange. Especially on a mobile platform where the page elements are often tiny if not microscopic.
"a version of Firefox that worked"
Firefox has been the main browser I have used for development work for the last 15 years. It works just fine.
yes I also use Edge (anything Azure related stays in there), Brave, and Opera daily (Chrome I have not had installed on my PC for the last 2 years)
There is an increasing list of requirements that I think most users in the market for a new browser require. The most important (to me at least) would be:
- Facility to automatically reject Cookies
- Facility to automatically turn on "Reader" mode to just cut the shit out of all of these autoplay videos and adverts
- Adblocking that works (YouTube adverts especially)
- Facility to automatically remove search results from websites that are known to be shit. (e.g: Don't show me Daily Fail articles)
- Non-Google code
That's utopia I think, as increasingly every day using the internet I yearn for the above. Give me a browser that does that and I'll happily use it until I'm in the grave. Until then, the rest is just noise.
One more for wolfetone's collection - automatic deletion of any cookies set by a page when either the tab is closed, or manually changed to a new domain. There is absolutely no benefit to a user for the vast number of cookies scattered around, and I shouldn't need to run extensions to make them go away. (Noscript and uBlock Origin seem to get rid of most of the other irritations).
"e.g: Don't show me Daily Fail articles"
Can't stand the Daily Fail myself, but I regularly buy a copy for someone else. For a paper that is so vigorously despised, it certainly seems to sell a lot of copies - it's one of the first to sell out in all of my local purveyors of papery news, from supermarkets to corner shops, leaving behind unwanted stacks of grauniads, suns, expresses etc. can't imagine why.
> - Facility to automatically reject Cookies
There are addons for such things. Personally I don't care and install an addon that just automatically _accepts_ them all without asking. Reduces the annoyance levels.
> - Facility to automatically turn on "Reader" mode to just cut the shit out of all of these autoplay videos and adverts
Tricky. It would break a lot of sites. I suppose you could have an addon that remembered which sites you wanted it used for... would that do?
> - Adblocking that works (YouTube adverts especially)
Getting harder. I am considering a PiHole for this.
> - Facility to automatically remove search results from websites that are known to be shit. (e.g: Don't show me Daily Fail articles)
You can manually block sites in UBlock Origin, you know.
PiHole doesn't work for it really. I had it set up on the home network and the YouTube app on the Fire TV just let the adverts through. Might be different for a desktop.
The thing is though why should I (or anyone) have to install all of these extensions? I can understand having an extension to do web development in the browser because not everyone wants to design a website, but that functionality comes baked in to Firefox and Chrome. I can't think of one person who thinks going on to a former Trinity Mirror website and having to deal with random pop ups and cookie consent boxes which force you to accept or pay to opt out, but I have to get an extension to deal with that? No. We need to take a stand, it's not enough to configure the browser to do the most basic things like this, we should have a browser that just does it.
As for breaking sites in Reader mode, yeah. That is true some sites do break with it. But they can get fucked too. I was looking up a recipe at the weekend and the page kept jumping up and down and playing random adverts/videos, when all I wanted was the ingredients. So I stuck Reader mode on, and the only things visible there was the bullshit talking about how good the bread tasted etc. The only way to get the ingredients was to suffer through the adverts and videos? Nope. I went to a different website.
> I was looking up a recipe at the weekend and the page kept jumping up and down
https://cooked.wiki/ is your friend.
«
It's free. No registration needed. Works everywhere.
Simply add "cooked.wiki/" in front of the URL in your browser's address bar when you're browsing for a recipe.
Demonstration
Cooked will give you a beautiful summarized recipe which you add your notes and edit to your liking.
You can save your recipe, create your own journal, see what your friends are cooking and their take on your recipes!
»
On a Linux PC, it is possible to have ad-free YouTube, but I only got there through years of experimenting with Ublock Origin rules, and I can't say for sure which are the ones that are actually effective.
The Vivaldi browser can "cast" YouTube from the PC to either my relatively modern television or older Freesat box, and will send successive videos without ads. Good for parties. If I had parties.
I use yt-dlp to download the vid, it even looks up if some kind person has added the vid to the sponsor block db and inserts chapter markers if it has (which is brilliant)
I wrote a little utility to scan my clipboard for yt urls, and download them to a known directory - then use kodi to play 'em - I don't think I've seen a youtub advert for at least a year now
I also get a little peeved should I (probably inadvertently) click on a video link on my phone and then have to suffer them (which I probably don't by just hitting the back button)
As a grumpy old git I have no need for elastic toenail supports from evil mega corp, nor lurid green bossa nova pants (whatever they are) from some random young'un init! - now if they were to advertise cigarettes, scotch, pork pies and cheese and onion crisps I might pay attention.
I long-ago gave up watching YouTube videos from the browser. I just use the YT website to find the url and then use yt-dlp (consult your local GitHub repository for details) to download the video. Write yourself a couple of alias’ to cover your most common options and you’re away :-)
... I personally hanker after a mobile browser that displays images (after a text search term) in a way that can be easily viewed.
My phone has a 6" screen, but searching for "cat" results in tiny thumbnails, clicking on a thumbnail displays an image that is not much larger. Rotating the phone to landscape mode doesn't help much, either.
I would love to be able to search for "cat", and then be able to swipe through one full screen image (without the address or title bar) after another.
Anyone who remembers the desktop online image browser Cooliris will have an idea of what I'm after.
Cheers
> Just so it does the tiling thing?
Mostly. I also liked the grouped tabs in the sidebar, and the ability to pin bookmarks to the sidebar. I used to use a combination of XUL addons to have bookmarks _and_ tabs in my sidebar and this was an interesting version of the idea.
It all depends on your usage model. Some people live in the same few sites most of their working day, and I can see this helping.
> Google could add this at a snap of the finger to Chrome and their business is gone?
Yes, but the same is true of all Chromium-based browsers. There's nothing special about Arc in this regard.
I don't find these features useful. They can be a source of "busy work", where you can organise things to feel good and get dopamine hit from achieving something, but they are not practical to use for me.
I just have a large text file where I dump stuff into and can quickly search for what I need.
I remember sites that I use regularly and for those used less often, there is autocomplete. I've never seen a point for bookmarks. Some of my friends use them religiously though, so each to their own I guess. Sometimes it is painful to watch them going through bookmarks to find a link to the site they want to show. They could just have typed it in the address bar or used search engine.
> They could just have typed it in the address bar or used search engine.
I used to do this. I gave up bookmarks and used to just search. But the creeping enshittification of search engines made it slowly fail, and now, I bookmark again. It's more reliable. If the site's gone you can always put a saved URL into the Wayback machine.
[Author here]
> I think your definition of cross platform FOSS software might need a little working on.
I don't. It's a fork of a very elderly version of Firefox. It's as FOSS as Firefox is, but it is much older, much less capable, uses an obsolete version of the rendering engine, can't usefully exploit multiprocessor machines, can't sandbox pages as Firefox and newer forks such as Waterfox can, and is generally rather crippled.
Well, all IMHO, anyway. I can't see any reason to use it myself.
i use it for most of my day to day stuff at home. seems to render the majority of page fine. It even goes as far as letting me write these posts.
"using the last truly FOSS cross-platform web browser standing" nowhere says 'which uses multiprocessors in such and such a way and provides sandboxing of pages'. So.
Liam Proven wrote:
I don't. It's a fork of a very elderly version of Firefox. It's as FOSS as Firefox is, but it is much older, much less capable, uses an obsolete version of the rendering engine, can't usefully exploit multiprocessor machines, can't sandbox pages as Firefox and newer forks such as Waterfox can, and is generally rather crippled.
And don't forget that "Moonchild" and his minions have created such a toxic dumpster fire on their community fora that you have to be either a fawning acolyte or someone who is blissfully unaware of the kind of people with a habit of savaging and banning anyone with a respectful, thoughtful yet differing opinion on something to put up with them.
I was a PM user for several years when FF was going through some annoying times but regardless of the technical attributes at this point I cannot stomach software projects run by people like that.
GrapheneOS is another example.
""Moonchild" and his minions have created such a toxic dumpster fire on their community fora"
Not been there for a while, have you. They're generally quite helpful these days after the most toxic guy threw his toys out of the pram and went home a year or so ago.
Like somebody above, I use Pale Moon on a daily basis and generally don't have any trouble.
"John 110" wrote:
Not been there for a while, have you.
I saw the part where Moonchild threw his former right-hand man under the bus after the users revolted and started abandoning the project. And realized that some of his bright ideas like the other fork were going nowhere too.
That doesn't change anything about how the project leader allowed all that toxicity to go un-punished for years, oftentimes with the leader chiming right in himself to make things even worse.
The project head demonstrated where he was coming from despite attempts to make nice after everything started to implode.
Not going to darken that doorway again.
There used to be a Firefox setting to have two separate bars but that got removed in the frog boiling so beloved of modern tech companies. However you can still configure a separate search bar.
Perhaps Zen has a similar setting. I can't tell at the moment, the site looks like it's been Slashdotted^WEl Reg'd.
So tiling child windows is a thing again? What about cascade? Is that making a comeback too? Sounds like good old fashioned MDI windows. Still, it's a good idea. I've been thinking for a while that Chrome (yes, I use it, no I don't care if Google is looking over my shoulder) could do with an option to open a second tab bar and dock it to the edge of the client area - it would be really useful to see two (or more) pages simultaneously. Tiling them might be even better!
Honestly, I've been using tiles all the time in Vivaldi since the first tt was added to the browser. I don't remember the festure being in Opera and I ditched Opera pretty soon after they moved to Chromium.and removed most of what made it Opera, but tiling pages is the absolute bomb given that since the ubiquity of the smartphone the trend has been to make every webpage about as wide as a pencil lead.
I suspect Zen will be missing far too many features that I use in Vivaldi for me to switch yet, and I'll wait to see whether it vanished into the ether, but a combination of open-source and no Google could easily make me bid a sad farewell to Vivaldi.
No thanks. I already have a goddamned window manager on this machine, thank you very much.
I just have Firefox open each site in a separate window and have the window manager MANAGE THE WINDOWS.
Is that so hard for people?
Granted this would be useful on Windows, which has a complete inability to handle more than about a dozen windows, despite the name of the "operating system"
> No thanks. I already have a goddamned window manager on this machine, thank you very much.
That's fair enough and I specifically said as much in the article.
If you know how to manage tiled windows and have tools already to do things like browse in ⅔ of the screen while having a reference pane in the other ⅓ to look stuff up on, good for you. You are quite possibly the sort of user who has already customised Firefox with a bunch of extensions.
But most people, I reckon, are not, and if offered scary new things like, say, tabs down the side, they won't. They'll be scared to try.
But plonk a new browser in front of them and say "this is new and cool and free and it helps you do stuff" and it has such things on by default, then they might try it... and like it.
Zen not only does things Firefox can't do without a lot of work (a tab sidebar _without_ tabs at the top -- that needs custom CSS and tweaks in `about:config`) but it also does stuff Chrome doesn't and can't do either.
In the sad depleted landscape of software ¼ of the way through C21, that's radical.
At different times doing different things I sometimes want to swap between:
* Tiles
* Tabs
* Windows (eg popups) without the whole app toolbar
* App instances, complete with full set of app tools
What I really want is a browser that fluidly allows all such changes, e.g. putting a page back into a tabsheet, having pulled it out into a separate instance five minutes earlier.
In fact I'd like a desktop environment which worries about all that, so the apps don't have to. Even have say Firefoxes in two tiles, LibreOffice Writer in another and Thunderbird emails tabbed in a fourth.
The Reg FOSS desk's main desktop machine is a 27-inch Retina iMac that can't officially run anything newer than macOS 12 "Monterey."
that is pure BS and you should know that.
My 2012 15in MBP runs the latest MacOS Sonoma 14.6.1.
It is not hard to find the tool that allows you to run later versions of the OS on old Mac kit.
To me, it sounds like a very weak reason.
> It is not hard to find the tool that allows you to run later versions of the OS on old Mac kit.
I have already written about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/09/opencore_legacy_patcher/
But for now, Monterey works perfectly fine, does everything I need, and is still getting OS updates. I am not going to risk breaking my Mac by running an unsupported OS just to get at one browser that I don't particularly want and do not need. The reason I bought a (used) Mac was that I want an easy, low-hassle main computer that just works.
Nothing like the old Speccy vs Commodore rising up again eh? "My browser's better than yours!". I've used Firefox for 18 years myself, no I'm not loyal I'm just too bloody old and lazy now to bother trying anything else, grow up it's a just a bloody browser it's not a lifestyle choice.
I'm sure Zen is wonderful, looks nice in the piccys but all the downloading, getting used to something new, options in different places, listen when you get to my age if I want stress then I'll just wind my wife up thanks! ha ha!!
Have used mozilla since the days when you ftp'd it down from the nsac site. used it's descendant's ever since and never had trouble with it. One trouble with zen is while it offers to transfer bookmark etc from every other browser, it doesn't offer to do that for firefox, at least i couldn't find a way short of exporting the bookmarks as an html file. Sticking with Firefox for the moment.
Liam Proven wrote:
Pull a window toward a screen edge, and it will snap there, but in Windows 11, the OS then visually prompts you in case you'd like to tile the previous window you were using on the other side of the screen.So does Windows 10. If not by dragging with the mouse, at least by the Win-Arrow key combo.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
