That was the joke I was setting up for

You mean the one from the company that pays out their CEO a fat $6m salary, paid for by Google bribing Mozilla to be the default search engine?

I don't trust your recommendation. Do you even realise you're being herded like sheep?

(I actually use it too, but I won't pretend they're saints. It also occasionally has trouble with some websites, but I haven't done any comprehensive testing to confirm whether it's browser-specific.)

Clearly if you arnt building your own web browser from the ground up, your a sheep. This is the only logical conclusion!!1!1!

Lol, but seriously every modern browser is basically crap ran or controlled by a large company that does fucked up or less then ideal things.

Clearly if you arnt building your own web browser from the ground up, your a sheep. This is the only logical conclusion!!1!1!

Obviously. It's the only way to be sure it has exactly the features I want and nothing else. Anyone recommending anything else has clearly been deluded to accept mediocrity. How else could they think something other than my exact tastes is decent?

Lol, but seriously every modern browser is basically crap ran or controlled by a large company that does fucked up or less then ideal things.

Yeah, it's fucked that we basically have to pick what flavour of shit we'd hate least. And once we're all settled in with our least disgusting brand, we obviously don't want to move anymore. I'm sticking with Firefox and probably will for some time to come. Adjusting to a different UI, migrating all my bookmarks and finding equivalents for my extensions is an effort.

Maybe some alternative will eventually entice me enough to overcome my reluctance to mix up my digital environment. I just hope it'll be by actually being good, rather than just "not as bad".

Zen also attempts to remove the telemetry that firefox has baked in.

But Zen also has features other than just vertical tabs that are really useful, like Glance.

Number of external connections means little without context of the content and what they are for.

This was the browser that required an account to even start using, it was just ridiculous.

I... Think Zen offers a bit more than just vertical tabs over Firefox.

Plus, the vertical bar looks really fat compared to the top bar on Firefox, for no reason.

Yes, I am fat-shaming the vertical bar. It has no right to be that fat compared to the rest of the UI.

Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.

Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I'm typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

The idea is to hide it altogether when you're not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.

you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

I'm aware of this, but even that single row of icons is very fat compared to the rest of the bars that exist on the browser (e.g. the window bar, the bookmarks bar, the search bar, etc). It just looks out of place.

You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it's a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.

I don't know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they're in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just... hide it when I'm not tabbing, so it's not an issue at all for me. Although I'll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it's a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).

I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is... quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.

Haha, it's funny that you went that far. I think the reason why I notice it and you don't, is the 4k factor. My screen is 1920x1200 iirc.