oh boy there's another new browser I know you guys didn't love my coverage of the last video I did like this but this one's going to be a bit different because I actually see a lot of really cool potential with Zen browser so what is Zen browser let's take a look because this isn't just a beautiful homepage it actually seems quite cool and you know what while we go over this I'm going to install it because I'm actually quite curious what using this is like they have an install guide hopefully I won't need that Zen and Zed that's going to be fun let's open up Zen Good Start bypass gatekeeper very good sign signing applications is hard I get it cool so now we have Zen browser so already looking promising so far let's get started fast beautiful and private choose the color theme I won't light mode cuz you all get too mad at me I will purple it though cuz I like purple you can import your data I'm not going to do that choose search why would you want eBay as your default search engine what do they like pay for that or something I I'm confused why you would want eBay as your default search is that just to have more options ducko is my search of choice because you can use the bang system to search on things like Google Images like doing exclamation point GI and now we're looking at corgis on Google Images also of note the browser's really fast unlike other browsers that we've recently covered there's a reason for that this browser is using existing browser engines if we go to the Zen browser GitHub we can learn a lot more about the project their focus is building with performance in mind they've optimized the browser to be as fast as possible they even have performance benchmarks let's take a look at these I have different hu Keys Bound in my browser of choice Arc and I'll have to rebind them here is there a way to expand and collapse the tab bar here oh is it that oh oh yeah that's way better cool now this is just Firefox based Arc and open source I thought they would compare the performance to other browsers here which not doing Zen's default preferences are based on better Fox which I believe is yeah it's a user JS file for Firefox to fix a bunch of its default configuration stuff this is kind of like a really really fancy skin on Firefox on a lower level it's it's much deeper than that but the for the lay man to understand what's going on here Zen browser is to Firefox what something like Edge or Arc is to Chrome where it's built on top of that same base and has configured a bunch of of things within it for you which I think is actually really cool I want to configure some things so the first thing is I need to change some shortcuts is there a um I don't ever want notifications for my browser does anybody actually have browser notifications on I feel like it's the worst thing ever control shift p oh that's not what I wanted toggle sidebar the command I want for that for sure cool I said that does not work oh compact mode sidebar ah that does it cool it's like is that an annoyance sure but that's the type of annoyance that can be fixed relatively trivially it's not like the browser performs terribly it's just that the hot keys that I'm used to were in weird places to bind and knowing what compact mode is versus all these other things it's just new language all things that can be cleaned up in the future does it let you put the sidebar on the right that's actually a really good question if it does that'll make me very happy uh I don't think you can oh this is really nice you can set up a proxy or a VPN directly inside of the browser so your browser can connect the internet differently from how the rest of your computer does it's a niche feature but it's really nice if you happen to need it there's a lot of stuff in here that I'm honestly pretty impressed with hi the top bar as well in compact mode oh yes now we're talking now we're just replicating Arc I don't think you can get the URL any other way though yeah I must have broke something where this is blocking I'm going to close and reopen okay I don't know what I changed that means that this is working when it wasn't before but it is cool had to play with the settings a bunch but it's working now these are all things that are easy enough to smooth out this isn't like fundamental failures in the browser so much as it's brand new and figuring out what buttons should go where is challenging and how to name all of these things and deal with them is not easy but it's in a really good State overall the browser flies I bet we can go to my stream right now and it plays back totally fine hi me it's going to be an infinite recursive Theo here in a second but yeah since it's based on Firefox it's insanely customizable it's like a deeply customized Firefox which more and more feels necessary as Firefox gets weirder and weirder as days go by I like the idea of this as a high quality Firefox rapper let's hear more from them though cuz I can sit here and play with it all day we should actually learn more about the browser the only limit is your imagination Zen's theme store offers a wide range of themes to customize your browsing experience try them out today what's happening there the page just slowly started moving does it do that in other browsers let me grab the URL and try it in Arc and see if it does the same thing so we were here and it just randomly got pushed down appears to have only happened in this browser is happening again it's not I have no idea why that happened just this element got moved down a whole bunch randomly so what does it offer split views horizontal splits and grid layouts oh yes if you know my complaints about Arc is that I love the split view here but I can't do anything if I want to put a different thing in like the top right here where I am like another widget I can't there's literally no way to in Arc you can only do a vertical split you cannot do a horizontal one so having not just horizontal splits but grid layout fully that's super cool we also got workspaces which is again one of the coolest parts of Arc I have three different workspaces here I have my work one I have my content like content management one and I have my stream profile that has things very limited here having that in Firefox is huge especially built in this well I know Firefox has their equivalent of like workspaces but it's much closer to Google where it's expecting you to have different browsers open for each one like if I open up Chrome I have person one which is my main and then I have spyware which is me around with some stuff but each of these is their own Chrome instance and if I want to have a different Chrome profile here it opens up another Chrome window so now I have this one signed in with Theo and this one signed in with alt but I can't easily navigate between them they all exist in their own windows and in their own worlds having this built in is awesome yeah being able to switch between them really easily as well huge side panels are very interesting I actually didn't like this feature too much as it was implemented in Arc I actually turned off all the weird preview stuff cuz I found it very annoying also does this website have this weird wrapping on here too yeah the padding on the site is really off just in general it might be because I'm on such a small screen like if I zoom out will it fix it yeah okay so the site looked really weird because I was on a 720p effective resolution but it should look a lot better like this if this wasn't an open source independent project I'd probably rail on them a bit more for that but their focus is entirely on the feature set and the customization of effectively Firefox really cool stuff I could see this being huge actually honestly I'm curious about the theme store because this is for those of us who have been around for a while you might remember the good old days of chrome themes was it you embed that was still running the Obama theme was it a Firefox theme so it was this one yeah I saw somebody yeah ined from stream for those who don't know she helps out with a bunch of the stuff that we do also is a god weird speedrunner and she uses Firefox with the original Obama Stars and Stripes theme I miss the days of this type of like quirky theming I totally understand why it's not a thing anymore but I do miss it and the idea of more customization and a store to browse that customization it's actually really cool o hide tab mute it hides the mute unmute button when the sidebar is collapsed to make clicking on tabs easier I like that you can do that level of customization with the themes theming in other browsers is like you can change the colors oh changes the viewport roundness okay so here this corner is rounded but if I reinstall this yeah as soon as I click that it goes away that's actually super subtle and cool uninstall it's rounded install that's crazy actually that you can fundament change the behavior of your browser at that level with a one click that's actually dope I've never seen this I've never seen that level of like customization via install okay you've sold me I'm interested so this is the real reason to build a new open source browser if your goal is to just be the alternative to whatever and you don't have an objective beyond that you're wasting everyone's time if your goal is to enable specific features behaviors and implementations that don't exist in the solutions that currently are out like is happening here that's awesome it's clear that Zen's goal isn't just be an open source alternative to Chrome it's building something different and I'm getting excited even though I'm not a Firefox guy I'm really not a Firefox guy God the AV layer in Firefox is is garbage but this is really cool apparently it also increases performance cuz it relies on less GPU resources to render the clip path that Zen uses to create the rounded Corners that's really cool and we can even look at it on GitHub to see how they do it aha disable web view Corners Chrome CSS that's cool first off it's funny that the CSS file for the Firefox based Zen browser to do the theming is named chrome. CSS is theme. Json link to that file yeah it does okay so it didn't need to be named that but they chose to which is really funny that's cool that you can just do a CSS thing like that and now I can install custom CSS that doesn't just customize like the color of things it actually fundamentally changes how the browser looks with one click that's dope that's really cool in a browser the Chrome is any visible aspect of a browser aside from the web page themselves this is not to be confused with the Google Chrome browser that's hilarious today I learned another good point I didn't even think to say this because it it feels obvious but it's actually not you can install multiple themes which is a big deal because in other browsers you have your theme for the browser in this browser themes are more like extensions where you can stack them and add multiple of them which is super cool so we have the disabl rounded Corners here if we wanted more like we wanted the new color scheme we can install that that actually looks a lot better I like that quite a bit compact sidebar allow the sidebar to take up even less space reduces the minimum width while expanded reduces the height of tabs I don't know if this one's working apparently you can configure it in the settings page oh that's the checkbox for the height that's really cool that's really cool this is this is the real benefit of Open Source when you make it not just easy to contribute to the codebase but you make it easy to contribute extensions of the user experience this is why VSS code one because they made it so easy to make changes to the editor not by learning the whole VSS code codebase but by making extensions with simple languages like JavaScript to make your experience in vs code better Zen is going in that direction they're taking a lot of the learnings that we have from browsers like what I'm using here with Arc and they're applying them in a way that is much more open by Nature it's not just open in the sense that the code is there it's open in the sense that the whole browser is being built to be torn apart and rebuilt by the users how they want to use it this is delivering on what I felt like was the original promise for Firefox and I'm actually really excited by this the more I'm seeing it there a few small tweaks to the toolbar you Center it hide bookmarks or folder icons you can span the toolbar on hover or search very cool the fact that there are this many huge changes like any one of these things is not able to be done in Arc the fact that I can't even change what side The Arc sidebar renders on is obnoxious the fact that I can't change here's a fun one there's a Hut Key to enable and disable the URL bar but when you have a split view it always shows the URLs split view is the one place I actually don't often want to see the URL bar and that's obnoxious you can customize those things here and there's also a whole open source community of people working on it so if you can get others interested in the things you want to change you can make real happen here this is the most promising new browser I've seen in a minute I honestly think the biggest hurdle that they're going to have to get over is that they're using Firefox as the base instead of chromium but as long as the Firefox engine continues to improve this is set for some really really solid success I am pumped about this how do I know Zen is safe Zen browser designed with a focus on security and privacy Additionally the browser codebase is derived from Firefox which is a well-known and trusted open source project users can verify the safety of the browser by reviewing the source code available on GitHub and by noting that it has been tested and certified as a free of virus and malware by various antivirus programs bit of a Reach people don't actually read the source code looking for exploits and there are plenty of exploits that sneak through code review look at all the chaos that happened with the um what was the massive encryption the Linux one that we all flipped out about earlier this year XZ thank you guys as always chat carrying me thank y'all yeah XZ can get through code review a lot of sketchy stuff can but the fact that this is a big open- source project that's based on Firefox and any diff between it and Firefox will be analyzed heavily means it's probably going to be safe but the fact that I just had to a disable like checks for my applications to get this running that's a little sketchier obviously you should give them a star on GitHub I'm going to go do that right now because they deserve it cuz is really cool Zen browser oh theme store is a different repo that makes sense now I'm hitting that star button cuz 1.7 th000 stars for an actually really promising browser that's sad we this needs to do better I if people are harassing me to use obsidian instead of notion why aren't they harassing me to use Zen instead of Arc like this has a much clearer value ad for so many people this is really promising but also I'm putting my money where my mouth is I'm joining the VIP role I want to support this I want to see these guys succeed oh it's only 23 a month for God level you know what we'll go for it least I can do and there we are I am now a god level donator I want to put my money where my mouth is it's the least I can do because I am genuinely really excited with what I'm seeing here this is not just another browser this is the most open approach to a browser design I've seen in a while and it's not fixing on stupid things like let's rewrite everything it's trying to make a good experience that could be customized to your specific needs and actually looks like a browser from the modern times like let's just compare this to Firefox right now no offense to mazilla and their designers but Firefox is one of the ugliest browsers I've ever seen like what the hell is going on here there's so much on the screen right now this is nasty we'll refresh quick start fresh with Firefox cuz I haven't used it for so long I didn't tell it to import data it just did that for me I did not tell it import it's just doing that go away yeah like what is going on here there is so much like what does this button even do Firefox view this is just is pocket built in by default now I love pocket but if that's just built into the browser that's weird as like the one pocket user still God God yeah I I can't do Firefox I can't it's it's ugly and it doesn't work with AV stuff the very least this is a huge level up there interesting you can switch tabs by scrolling so if you have the bottom of a page it goes to the next tab I would never want that oh hover your mouse over the tab bar and use your mouse wheel to scroll through them that's kind of cool there's unique like like actually new ideas here I'm assuming that Arc doesn't do that yeah Arc does not do that you can just scroll that way here huge shout out to the Zen team for putting the work in to make something actually novel and unique and not getting lost in the sauce of Reinventing things for the sake of it I might make this my default browser for a bit and see how I feel about it should I do it boys let me know in the comments if I should actually run Zen for a while and see how I feel it'll be a bit annoying hopping between Zen and Zed and then all my default stuff but I'm actually quite excited about what they're doing and if they can make the ux customizable enough to fit my admittedly weird needs I see no reason why I wouldn't try this out more seriously okay there's one reason which is web RTC calls in the browser but other than that I'm actually really excited here and I hope you guys are too let me know what you think in the comments and hopefully I'm not going to get flamed for this one until next time peace nerds