My biggest concern with these forks, is do they get the security updates quickly enough as they’re all downstream from either Chromium, Firefox, or web-kit. I’ve tried Zen a bit and had a good experience. From a privacy perspective, cookie management, containers, anti-fingerprinting, and telemetry are probably the biggest categories to address.
Again, I always have security concerns for the forks getting patches quickly. The smaller the team the more risk likely in this category. Librewolf won my vote. I use it for almost everything. If the page won’t work there, I typically have to use Chromium because the site is just poorly built.
I’d also recommend doing something to manage privacy at the DNS level for your local network/machine. Piehole or NextDNS would be a good place to start. I landed on NextDNS as it’s pretty cheap, easy, and stable. With internet, it has to “just work” or the family gets annoyed fast. I can still black-hole traffic from my network that is phone-home telemetry from devices more concentrated on collecting info for the manufacture than doing what they were purchased to do.
After daily driving it from march to now i can say that in term of user experience it’s great ! On the privacy side it’s better than firefox since it disable telemetry by default and offer a really good container tabs integration but far from librewolf with resist fingerprinting on.
The team is smaller and has made mistake in the past ( leaving remote debugging on in a release ) but it’s nothing egregious for me and I will continue to use it in place of firefox/librewolf.
The Changelog seems to be mostly about the UI, security updates come from upstream, i.e. Firefox. But there’s this further down:
In response to recent privacy concerns, we’ve significantly strengthened Zen’s privacy measures. Previously, we only disabled telemetry, but some minimal pings were still being sent. Now, Firefox telemetry has been completely stripped out from the core.
Additionally, onboarding pages and initial Essentials favicons are now locally bundled and our website no longer relies on any external services, CDNs, nor Cloudflare services. Initial Essentials selected on startup will only be loaded when the tab is clicked on, so connections won’t be established until you explicitly enter the tab. We also changed our onboarding Essentials options to more privacy and productivity focused sites.
Only critical security updates and other non-telemetry-related services remain. As a result, the number of external connections has dropped from 82 to around 20-10 — factoring in that Zen’s site is loaded twice (for the welcome page and privacy policy).
Librewolf + LocalCDN is still better. Fight me!
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