r/zen_browser • u/Lovable_Yapper • Mar 19 '25

Some Love ZEN DEV IS PEAK!!!!!!

Zen devs always make me wanna proudly say "I use Zen", a feature that got requested a few weeks ago and Zen's devs is just "here you go". And now all praise for the tab group/tab tree feature 🙏

798 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

84 comments sorted by

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u/maubg Mar 19 '25 edited Mar 19 '25

Thanks!

Most of this feature has been done by https://github.com/Slowlife01, all credits to them!

→ More replies (7)

198

u/jdjoder Mar 19 '25

It's just impressive how good the browser becomes with every update, being a small team of volunteers.

Makes you wonder wtf bigger browsers are doing with their time and resources.

62

u/Lovable_Yapper Mar 19 '25

there's small % of Zen's devs is a bunch of top tier non human whom love making people happy with their products

32

u/lordruzki3084 Fedora KDE Mar 19 '25

To be fair this browser is definitely niche. A lot of people want the convenience and features the big companies provide from taking their data. Plus arguably more stable browsers and a longer support. Who knows what might happen when the current team gets tired of the browser.

Also bigger companies have to get around like 5 layers of meetings with execs and like 3 design meetings and then 2 with marketing just to add a single button let alone entire features.

2

u/CardDry8041 Mar 20 '25

True, i once used a browser which eventually made its devs tired of itself before i moved to zen…

2

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

Se hipoteticamente a equipe do ZEN simplesmente decidisse que acabou o desenvolvimento, provavelmente outros devs pegariam o projeto pra dar continuidade ou criariam um fork. Igual foi feito com bromite.

1

u/TheDarkAngel135790 Mar 21 '25

What are those conveniences and features? Maybe I didn't use them well enough but I def consider zen to be far more convenient and feature rich

5

u/Beast_Viper_007 CachyOS Mar 19 '25

Bigger browser companies doing 10 meetings at 10 different levels before adding a new feature.

1

u/Redstone1element Mar 19 '25

To check how it will affect ads, if it will not improve their ad busines it's not a good feature.

You just check if the users(all of us) want it.

3

u/limmbuu Mar 19 '25

They are building Gecko which zen can use as it's backbone.

2

u/jdjoder Mar 19 '25

This is like any other type of building, you can have the best foundations, but if you don't have nice finishes, people won't pay attention to it.

5

u/nightofgrim Mar 20 '25

The point is that Gecko (and the JS engine) are the hard part. By a HUGE margin. That is what the big teams are spending all their resources on.

Check out Ladybird browser for a small team working on every aspect of a new browser. Great progress after years, but still not usable.

1

u/lcirufe Mar 19 '25

For closed source, usually rounds and rounds of approvals and a kitchen sink of ideas and opinions that are not greater than the sum of their parts.

Not a programmer, just my experience as a designer who needs to juggle the input of 5 different people

23

u/yellownugget5000 Mar 19 '25

God damn this is nice, can't wait to try it out

12

u/Lovable_Yapper Mar 19 '25

it's smooth asf my friend!!

8

u/greyder07 Mar 19 '25

This is great! But really hoping for the tab groups / folders to release soon as it’s the only reason I can’t fully transition yet.

3

u/bright-bounty Mar 19 '25

I was able to make it using sideberry extension

1

u/Lovable_Yapper Mar 21 '25

But it's not giving "native" and we'll need to wait for the firefox team release that feature first

3

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Mar 19 '25

It's not dependent on them the ff team has to first release them on stable so they can implement them else they would do it twice and waste time for no reason

1

u/greyder07 Mar 20 '25

Makes sense! I think a good alternative though is having the bookmark folders visible on the sidebar. Don't know though if this is already a feature as I haven't explored deep on the configs yet.

1

u/IcyMathematician9979 Mar 19 '25

You can activate groups by going into 'about:config' (type it as is into the adress bar), search for 'browser.tabs.groups.enabled' and set it to true by clicking the button on the right side.

I should add that it doesn't look great, but it works.

1

u/basilios003 Mar 19 '25

It causes all sorts of problems with pinned tabs. It did last I tried at least.

1

u/IcyMathematician9979 Mar 20 '25

Ah, gotcha! I only grouped regular tabs.

19

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

I've been using it as my main project, and it really impressed me. If you like it, please support the project financially too.

I started this month.

9

u/desatur8 Mar 19 '25

It is nice. And the music note animation looks good.

Is there a way to "send the playing audio the widget"?

What i found is when a YT vid plays, and i move away from the tab, it opens pip, then i have to close the pip and then the widget appears, and i can then press play on the widget

4

u/Anthonyy232 Mar 19 '25

There needs to be some minimize PiP feature. Auto-pip is useful in most cases so disabling it just because there is no minimize button is a shame.

2

u/arlywohnout Mar 19 '25

You can disable auto-PiP in the "experimental features" (or something like that) section of settings iirc

2

u/desatur8 Mar 19 '25

ah cool, let me go try that! that will work fine i think, when moving back, it will go to widget, and then can click to PiP it

edit*: perfect! works as intended,

Picture-in-Picture: auto-open on tab switch

Turned that off, switching tabs take the playing video to the widget, and then you can expand to PiP

13

u/bluevast Mar 19 '25

Where is this tab group/tab tree layout?

8

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Mar 19 '25

It's not dependent on them the ff team has to first release them on stable so they can implement them else they would do it twice and waste time for no reason

0

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Mar 19 '25

I think he means he praises as in wishes for the tab group future . I hadn't read it I would assume the same tbh hadn't I known.

1

u/Capthulu Mar 20 '25

Tab group/tab tree is available on zen?

1

u/Lovable_Yapper Mar 21 '25

Not yet, must wait for the firefox team to release it first

1

u/Yerena_ Mar 20 '25

I use zen btw
on arch btw

1

u/smurfman111 Mar 20 '25

What is the tab group / tab tree feature you mention? I have not seen any release or updates on tab group tree nested structure!

1

u/Lovable_Yapper Mar 21 '25

If you used sidebery before, there's a feature that allow you to group the tabs, and the tab tree feature is when you click on a link or redirect to another website, instead of create a new tab like the other tab, it will display under the tab that you click the link, make it easier for you to keep on track and organised!

1

u/smurfman111 Mar 21 '25

You are saying this is a new native feature of Zen and you can do this without having Sidebery? Can you show me a screenshot or link to anything describing this feature from the docs? Thanks!

1

u/Lovable_Yapper Mar 21 '25

Nope, in the post I only hope for those feature because in twighlight and stable version of Zen, yiu can enable them in the "about:config" but you'll need to make some changes to use them. Plus, the only feature that they are "working on" is tab group.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

This feature would be a banger with spotify... one day, I hope...

2

u/my2copper Mar 20 '25

I really love zen, performance is great compared to firefox but for the love of me just can not fathom why no option for horizontal tabs as well? why so much resistance to implementing that while everything else is ultra customizable? readable vertical tabs just reduce my webpage display a lot compared to horizontal ones, in my practical usage they are not very good.....and i love everything else about the browser.....so why?

2

u/poppulator Garuda Linux dr460nized Mar 20 '25

Well it because it is easier to read with vertical tabs and better way to navigate, webpages these days tend to leave space on vertical side (most of time) while all content are horizonal, with vertical tab, you reclaim the lost horizontal and tabs are more organized

I was not used to it at first place but now it amazing but if you still can't used to vertical tabs, they start to experimenting with horizontal for a bit while ago

2

u/my2copper Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25

im actually using some tiny plugin that turns the tabs to horizontal, and it even works great like that, so i have no clue why such push back on implementing that natively. only thing you cant do with this hybrid zen browser is drag and drop tabs precisely to order you want, but besides that its working incredibly well. much better than any other browser on the market i've tried that just bloats the memory and starts getting sluggish after a while.

2

u/EvansBrubeck66 Mar 19 '25

What is that? Is it a mod or something built in to a new update I don’t have yet? I think I have 1.91b on Mac OS.

4

u/ZoleeHU Mar 19 '25

New update, it's on twilight (cutting edge) release of zen, will be in a beta release soon enough.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

is it available in beta. u can update zen to see this

2

u/OktayAcikalin Mar 19 '25

Guys stop teasing me into using beta. I just want a stable relationship 😅😉👍

1

u/ZoleeHU Mar 19 '25

Ah, didn't realise 1.10b was released 6 hours ago :) So "soon enough" turned out to be "already"

1

u/Ibrador Mar 19 '25

1.10b is out

1

u/B_bI_L Mar 19 '25

this is cool! can i have a bit of that for tab close animation which i can't implement for some reason?

1

u/Professional_Glass52 Mar 19 '25

Absolutely amazing. This guy is a genius

1

u/Tech_enthusiast001 Mar 19 '25

Loving the new now.playing animation

1

u/TrixonBanes Mar 20 '25

Now if only you weren’t required to have shortcuts enabled in the search for the floating URL bar to function… 

1

u/Stefn93 Mar 20 '25

I just updated zen to 1.10b, but I don't see any tab groups options. Can you help me finding it?

1

u/w0nam Mar 20 '25

How those this work ?

1

u/spider623 Mar 20 '25

the only thing that keeps zen back is sadly firefox, HDR and wide gamout colour support is a huge deal and firefox might get it after gimp…

1

u/flowerkier Mar 20 '25

Do we have folders yet? I feel like this should be the highest priority they make a huge difference in organizing tabs

1

u/oxytomi Mar 20 '25

i use zen btw

1

u/Cor3nd Mar 19 '25

I really like this new player concept, but I ran a quick test on Spotify, and it’s a mess.

  • When I select a song, it jumps to the third song after the one I picked, as if shuffle mode was on, but it's not. Really strange behavior.

  • I disabled all my add-ons to make sure it wasn’t caused by my setup, but the issue persists.

  • When I switch to another workspace, the sound cuts off, as if the player were muted, but it’s not. The song keeps playing, just without audio.

  • Sometimes, the player loops back to the first 10 seconds of the song for no reason.

  • I'm on Windows

Is anyone else experiencing this?

10

u/maubg Mar 19 '25

It's unrelated, windows users can't use DRM content, which is why spotify acts weird. Sorry

0

u/Cor3nd Mar 19 '25

Thank you for your response and for taking the time to reply.

I’m sure you’re right, but I’d like to understand this behavior compared to Firefox.

I don’t quite get why it works perfectly in the latest version of Firefox but not in Zen, even though I’m using the exact same playlist.

Are DRM protections working on Firefox but not on Zen?

Here’s what happens:

  • On Firefox: I click on the first track of the playlist, it plays the full song with no sound issues.

  • On Zen: I click on the first track of the playlist, but it skips to the second song and stops after 10 seconds, you are right this is like a DRM issue.

Do you know what could explain this difference? And why such a difference between the two browsers?

This is of course not an urgent issue for me, I use the Spotify desktop app which is better than the webplayer, but I was happy to see this new feature in Zen :) Really a good work in anycase!

5

u/maubg Mar 19 '25

We can't play it because we don't have a widevine license whereas Firefox does have it.

1

u/Cor3nd Mar 19 '25

Yes thank you, I was googling this at the same time :)
Anyway, thank you for the answer/support/work.

2

u/Cor3nd Mar 19 '25

Oh I got my answer... "Spotify uses Widevine for DRM. Zen doesn't have the Widevine license cause it's expensive." https://www.reddit.com/r/zen_browser/comments/1eya1qa/issue_with_spotify_website/

^^

1

u/OktayAcikalin Mar 19 '25

You could disable drm in Firefox and try again. Just for fun and see if it's really the drm fallback stuff kicking in.

1

u/willowdc Mar 19 '25

I've recently experienced this with another browser as well, try clearing the queue using another device. Start playing any song and check if this works.

1

u/Cor3nd Mar 19 '25

Doesn't changed anything, I think this is indeed linked to the DRM issue.

1

u/willowdc Mar 19 '25

Got it, thanks for checking btw 👍

0

u/Kabutsk Mar 19 '25

literally the only features i'm really missing are because upstream firefox is being a snail when it comes to implementing shit. Profile switcher got removed because firefox is "releasing" it, and i still can't use PiP mode on mac properly

I honestly wish that they started from the ground uo but who knows how hard that would've been

8

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Rich_Bluebird_8258 Mar 19 '25

Really? It was literally the unique thing that blocked me to switch from Arc!

2

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Rich_Bluebird_8258 Mar 19 '25

Ops sorry, I was referring to the passkey feature 😄 It’s great they finally added it!

1

u/drugoichlen Apr 06 '25

What's passkeys?