Zen Browser

Horizontal tabs stop working at about fifteen. The favicons become the label, the label becomes a guess, and finding the tab with the API documentation takes longer than searching for it again.

Zen Browser is a Firefox fork that rebuilds the interface around that problem: vertical tabs down the side where titles are readable, workspaces that separate one context from another, and a split view that tiles up to four pages at once. It’s open source, it renders with Gecko, and your Firefox extensions and profile come with you.

Install link

  flatpak install flathub app.zen_browser.zen        # the usual route on any distro
yay -S zen-browser-bin                             # Arch, from the AUR
  

Tarballs for other distributions are on the site, and it’s on macOS and Windows too. First launch offers to import bookmarks, passwords, and history from another browser.

The three features that change the day link

Workspaces. One for work, one for a side project, one for whatever you’re reading. Each holds its own tabs, so switching context hides everything belonging to the other one instead of leaving it in the strip. This is the feature people stay for — closing a workspace is closing a chapter, not losing forty tabs.

Vertical tabs with pinned essentials. Pin the four things you always have open; the rest scroll below them with readable titles. Compact mode collapses the sidebar to icons until you reach for it, which gives a laptop screen its vertical space back.

Split view. Documentation on the left, the thing you’re building on the right — up to four panes in a grid. It removes a surprising amount of Alt-Tabbing when you’re following a guide.

Then two smaller ones worth knowing: Glance opens a link in an overlay so a quick check doesn’t become another tab, and the interface is themeable to an unusual degree if you like that sort of thing.

Be clear-eyed about the trade link

• It’s a fork, so security patches arrive after Mozilla ships them. The lag is usually short and the project tracks Firefox releases closely, but “usually short” is the correct expectation, not “immediately”. If your threat model doesn’t tolerate that, run Firefox with its own vertical tabs — it has them now — or Floorp.
• Version numbers still carry a b. It’s stable enough for daily use and it is not claiming to be finished.
• It’s Gecko, not Blink. Rendering is Firefox’s, so a site built and tested only against Chrome may misbehave. Benchmarks put it behind Chrome and Safari; in practice the difference is smaller than the tab-hunting it saves.
• A fork is one team’s roadmap. Keep your bookmarks and passwords synced somewhere you control, so moving back is an afternoon and not a project.

Next link

Some sites don’t want to be tabs at all → Webapp Manager