this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Zen browser is basically FireFox made to look like Arc
Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there's little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.
Why do people want vertical tabs? It feels as if it just takes up more space, and my muscle memory after all these years makes me move to the top. I always go back to horizontal tabs after using vertical tabs for a day.
because when you have more than 8 tabs open on a horizontal tab row, the tab handles start to become narrower and tab titles become unreadable and almost useless. with vertical tabs tab titles can be as long as you see fit, and the tab title does not take away space from other tab handles so more can fit. essentially its more space efficient I think.
but I don't use it because my firefox theme breaks down when I set up vertical tabs, and everything will be white, even though I don't even use userchrome customizations
Because web content is increasingly mobile and vertical-oriented. So the horizontal space is usually empty anyway.
Sometimes new things take time to get used to but if you try it for more than a single day you may find that you like it.
Makes sense. The sites I am using most probably have not adopted the new style yet. And like I said, the hardest part is the muscle memory of looking at the top for my tabs and moving my mouse to the top to select a tab.
Zen is a lot more than just vertical tabs. And I have never run into any "pains and bugs".
Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.
I really like the split view in Zen. I wish it supported drag and dropping links across pages but it's still handy.
i would like to move from zen to firefox, but as of right now i’m somewhat unhappy with the vertical tabs in firefox. i’ll keep an eye on them though and make the switch once they got some more features (like only appearing when mousing to the left edge of the window and staying entirely hidden otherwise)
You should try the Shimmer userchrome tweaks along with the Sideberry extension. With both of them it's even better than Zen IMO.
You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it'd take me longer to adapt to that when moving back to Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it's pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.
I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I'm quite happy with it now. I'd have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn't just use the engine, but it's also hooked up to Firefox's account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn't seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?
Zen makes something like 84 external connections, which is around double what even Edge makes (and Microsoft has basically become a malware company).
This was patched, and the vast majority were just fetching thumbnails.