I’ve been contemplating the switch in the past few days. How long have you been using it? What are some pain points that you had?

Been using zen browser for quite some time. I use a session saver add-on and that one works weirdly due to how Zen has spaces and how that works. The way I understand zen’s spaces is like they are browser sessions that can be run simultaneously. Each of them have their own pinned tabs for example, can have default containers they open in, on top of the universal whole browser pinned tabs they call essentials tabs; that’s limited to 12 for now.

Sideberry and tree style tabs might not work as you expect because of the changes the zen team made

Is it FOSS?

It is

I’ll have to check it out!

Or Librewolf

How is this different to Firefox? Vertical tabs, containers (workspaces), tab previews (glance).

Looks interesting but I can’t figure out what makes this different to what I can already do in Firefox.

It is different in that it breaks every few releases. Otherwise Firefox is sufficient if vertical tabs is the aim. I used zen for over a year before I just got tired of the constant breaking.

I had a similar experience when I tried it a few years back

still breaks. I’m not a fan of it.

I do like Floorp though. slightly bit more customization, fairly solid Japanese dev team that doesn’t release something until everything is rock solid so you know updates aren’t going to break anything. I can’t even recall the last time Floorp broke if ever.

When I tried floorp a few years back, it never even felt in a working condition. Probably much better now, but the second I tried any of the customizations, things seemed to break and get stuck. Firefox has been solid for me since before it was Firefox.

Zen devs were incredibly bad about messing with my workflows that I had setup for Zen. So much so that I eventually just stopped updating the app and moved back to Firefox to let them get their goals together.

I use Zen for small things like research and whatnot, but Firefox will always be the only browser I use for serious stuff like banking and bills.

Zen is better these days, but the fact I can’t get rid of the spaces crap really irks me. I don’t need it, and don’t want it, but it is a “core part” of their ethos so I am stuck with it. I just renamed it to … and stopped worrying about it as much. Still recommend giving it a shot for smaller stuff, but definitely not banking and the like.

I stick with zen because of spaces. I have a few, e.g. common browsing, work or serious topics, finances, shopping. Each of them I assigned default containers that they will run. And each if them have different pinned tabs related to the spaces.

It’s been so long since I switched that I honestly forgot how Firefox base is. I think before I switched I used sideberry to do all that spaces thing but zen is more integrated feeling.

There’s just something that hits it for me that it’s indispensable for me.