A customizable browsing experience

Meditative Surfing

© Photo by Callum Shaw on Unsplash

© Photo by Callum Shaw on Unsplash

Article from Issue 294/2025
Author(s):

Zen Browser, an open source Firefox fork, promises users greater convenience and improved data protection, along with customizable display modes to help you stay focused on your work.

The newly developed Zen Browser, a Mozilla Firefox fork, makes switching from the original Firefox browser easier thanks to its almost identical controls. With low resource consumption and innovative display modes, such as compact and split mode, Zen Browser offers genuine added value to newcomers and those looking for a Firefox alternative.

Zen Browser behaves like the original Firefox in many respects, including in the settings, among other things. Currently, the program lacks the ability to display multiple tabs in a single line, although the developers are looking to add this capability to Zen Browser's feature set in an upcoming version (see the "Version Jump" box). For the time being, Zen Browser lists tabs vertically in the sidebar. Similar to Firefox, you can quit the program by closing the last tab.

Zen Browser runs on Linux (x86_64 and AArch64), macOS, and Windows, although the relatively new program is not included in the package sources of popular distributions. You can download Zen Browser from the website [1] as a tarball or AppImage, or you can grab an installer from Flathub. The easiest way to install is with the tarball; just unpack the TAR.BZ2 archive, which weighs in at around 94MB, into a directory of your choice. This creates a zen/ folder from which you can launch the binary of the same name at the command line.

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