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)

    • weststadtgesicht@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I think most complex and long-term OSS projects have “employed” contributors paid by donations or sponsorships (e.g. Linux, Blender, LibreOffice, …)

    • nyan@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 year ago

      A whole bunch of non-user-facing projects providing vital libraries that are largely ignored until something blows up in people’s faces, as happened with openssl some years ago. Some of them contain quite a bit of code (for example, ffmpeg, which underpins a lot of open-source media playback software). Among browsers specifically, Pale Moon has been around for years, is maintaining a lot of code no longer carried by Firefox along with a fair amount of original code, and has no cash source beyond user donations, which might stretch to paying for the servers in a good month.

      The projects with corporate sponsorship, or even a steady flow of large donations, are in the minority. There’s a reason the xkcd about the “project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003” exists.