It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
What’s so great about zen?
Its pretty chill.
Its tab and session management tools are my favorite across all browsers.
I use vertical tabs with multiple layers of folders to basically keep everything I need to access frequently organized directly on the tab list instead of having to open it again whenever I need (also saves me from having to remember if I already opened something). For example I have a folder for each project I’m working on and I add to it everything related to that project. Project definition links, Github Pull Requests and so on. The PR links stay there while I wait for them to be reviewed or merged so I can quickly access them to see if they need any action. Once the task is done I remove them from the folder again.
There’s a new feature named Live Folders which automatically opens a tab for every item of an RSS or Github feed. I use it to auto open PRs that are waiting for my review. The feature is still quite limited but already pretty useful.
One of the projects I’m working on is a voice chat web app and the browser helps me by allowing me to open two different sessions of the web app side by side as a single app. Makes it so much easier to test things when I don’t have to be handling two different active windows like I used to have to with other browsers.
One other feature that I don’t use so much anymore is the ability to have completely separate tab lists for different contexts. It’s useful to separate work and personal stuff for example, but I already use separate devices for that.
It has a strong focus on workflow improvements. I love the way it handles pinned tabs where third party links open as a modal and you can reset the tab with a middle click. It also has very good workspace management and useful keybinds.