Let's face it: People aren't gonna take something named 'Floorp' seriously.

If you do, especially to the point you're downvoting this, maybe it's time to ask yourselves why people are not taking you seriously.

Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality, but just that more authenticated Microsoft accounts, real or fake, have pressed a button—where the more popular/normie/maintstream languages/frameworks get the most signal. You can also read anecdotes thah some folks use this as a bookmark to look at later rather than actually using or enjoying a project.

Free software doesn’t need to rely on a dubious value signal on a proprietary social media platform like MS Github.

I'll start believing or caring about any alternative browsers when I see a big influx of money comming to a browser project. Just grabbing a codebase and changing some settings and releasing it with a new name is not really creating or maintaining a browser. People keep thinking that it's easy to maintain a huge project like a browser by just praying and volunteers.

I feel like you are making up words

No clue why except i think people are mostly just really fed up with Mozilla making a non profit about everything but their browser. I could see a lot of people prefer the name and the willingness to try new stuff compared to floorp.

But really i think most of it is it's very different from Firefox and people are tired of Firefox.... But still hate chromium.

I like Zen so much I stopped browser hopping. It has sane defaults, vertical tabs default, and it's x64_v3 optimized speed is nice. Default theming is nice, too.

Zen has the look and polish that makes it not feel like just another Firefox clone. It's how I imagine people feel when using Microsoft Edge and Brave; there's enough there to keep it perceptually separated from its Chrome base.

Floorp was great, but it didn't bring much to the table that you couldn't already tweak yourself with base Firefox. Heck, projects like firebuilder let you build something close with a couple CLI prompts.

Zen doesn’t even support passkeys properly. I stopped using it almost immediately after trying it. I attribute it to good marketing and PR as an Arc alternative. Especially after Arc showed their hand very clearly regarding how they’d respond to Manifest v3 and then the recent security fiasco.

When everyone is in the market for a new Browser and you’re selling new ideas, you’ll find a lot of buyers. Hopefully from the ashes of Firefox someone comes out on top though. For now I’ll keep using my customized FF for everything, but I imagine that will have to change in the not too distant future.

I ended up liking it a lot. I don't know why or how, but it (as Flatpak) uses less RAM and CPU than native (RPM) Firefox, so I've been enjoying testing it as daily driver for basic navigation. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but Zen works fine, has good proposals and is still improving and hearing the community. Well done and well deserved

Current ff has a vertical tabs sidebar pref in about:config (I currently use it that way)

I read the zen documentation (not much there)

I really don't see anything special about it.

Their security sets insecure SSL as broken. OK. I set that years ago in about:config Does it use post quantum encryption? Does it use ECH? Does it . so many questions.

I'm good with my personally tweaked and hardened versions of Firefox/arkenfox.

To me this looks mostly cosmetic.

I'm sticking with Floorp for now. Faster development doesn't mean it will be sustainable, but we'll see. Or necessarily that all feayures may be good. More iant better. Brave and Opera GX have a bunch of features too.

But I'm using Firefox and Floorp as a variant because I want something that gets fundamentals right. And if Zen becomes huge, great.

Zen has a superior UX out of the box but their decisions have been questionable. Recently Pinned tabs were changed to Essentials for seemingly no reason changing their behavior completely.

Meanwhile that one MacOS user (me) waiting for them to properly integrate with apple’s passwords app and passkeys:

I really enjoy using Zen. It's pretty, has plenty of neat features that don't require extensions, and the development is very active. The software is not yet mature, so it frequently changes behaviours and how things look, so new users need to be aware of that.

I did try Floorp a few months ago, but I didn't like it as much. It felt like using regular Firefox with a few tweaks.

While I've tried both, I am not sensitive to any of these trends. I'm just glad to see some alternatives that can fit anyone needs. That's the power of the open-source.

Although I understand the reasoning beyond the language used in this post, I'm sad to read that hardened privacy is considered a power user thing.

Floorp causes me a ton of issues on DRM based streaming sites. F1TV being the worst

What I'd really like is LibreWolf level privacy protection whilst the browser is running but that allows me to retain cache, history etc but also encrypts everything locally when the browser is closed and is password protected and only decrypts everything when the password is entered.