Zen Browser

★★★★☆

Similar to Arc, Zen has a non-cluttered interface that mostly stays out of your way and is built around a sidebar that encourages you to keep things simple and organized. I’m not sure if the design is specifically inspired by the aspects of Arc that people have liked most, or if they’re just chasing the same goals.

Unlike Arc, Zen is Free-as-in-Libre Software, built on Firefox instead of on Chromium, runs on more platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux), and doesn’t require you to sign into a cloud account just to use the browser. And it actually has bookmarks! (It also doesn’t have AI features like Arc’s summaries and so on.)

Like Waterfox it removes Mozilla’s existing data collection. It doesn’t go as far on privacy as LibreWolf, but it’s notable that Zen’s privacy policy starts out with “Information We Do Not Collect.”

Connections and Compatibility

It can connect to Firefox Sync (which is encrypted) and is compatible with Firefox add-ons. There are the usual hoops to jump through when you first install it to get native messaging to connect to KeePassXC, unless you’re using running it through Flatpak on Linux, in which case the hoops don’t work either (see below).

Zen can’t play media locked by Widevine DRM, because the small team can’t justify spending the money on the license when there are other things they want to build. (For comparison, LibreWolf rejects DRM support on principle.) If you want to watch Netflix or whatever on your desktop, you can use another browser like Waterfox for it.

As with LibreWolf and Waterfox, not all of the documentation has been copied and updated to be Zen-specific yet, and in some cases it just links straight to the Firefox docs. I do appreciate that the About box tells you both what Zen version you’re using and what Firefox version it’s built on.

Flatpak, AppImage & Linux

When installed using Flatpak, web browsers can’t connect over native messaging to KeePassXC. And Zen doesn’t actually open the first page when opening a link from another app unless it’s already running. These are both fixed by using the AppImage, but now I need to manually add a zen.desktop file and icon so it’ll show up in the system menu. Then I have to either update the AppImage manually or install another tool to update the AppImage automatically, plus it turns out there’s another bug where the AppImage Zen opens a new copy of Thunderbird on the rare occasions I click on an email address, which launches a blank profile to avoid conflicting with the already running one…

I finally ended up just downloading the tarball and pointing zen.desktop to it. It’s old-school, but it all works properly!

Availability

Regular installers with updaters for Windows and Mac. Flatpak, AppImage and tarballs for Linux. Both Intel/AMD and ARM on all platforms.

No mobile version. I think the closest comparison would still be Arc Search, but as with the desktop version, Arc isn’t Free (just free) or Gecko-based.