To consider: sticking with the main browsers helps you resist fingerprinting
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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You trying to coax me from librewolfs maturity for new browsers?
Here I am thinking what's a floorp and mixing it up with the plumbus.
floorp
Zen video playback was awful for me, but I like almost everything else about it.
I genuinely thought this was satire, never heard of either and have only just started with LibreWolf… now I have more options to research!
I use Vivaldi and Zen as second. I need the sync function and I don't want an Mozilla account, nor an third party solution. Vivaldo offers full sync ee2e no knowledge in the own server in Iceland.
Vivaldi isn’t open source. Not sure I’d trust that from a privacy perspective.
I've switched from Librewolf to Zen for a few months now, and it's been great so far. There is all the fun features like the essentials tab, and the tab groups. Also Zen Mods is super cool. It is like a repo of css mods for zen.
There was some controversy about the debug thing, but as others pointed out, it happened during the alpha phase, when the development team is still new to the project.
For hardening, you can use Arkenfox, Betterfox, or Phoenix. All of these work on Zen (I've tried them all). Librewolf is based on Arkenfox, so if you use it, you'll get most of Librewolf's privacy features. I recommend Arkenfox. Personally, I believe Betterfox is a balance take between privacy and usability, while Phoenix is the most extreme option. Arkenfox offers stronger privacy features than Betterfox but is not as extreme as Phoenix.
Edits: also don't forget uBlock :)
Both are using Firefox base
I like to test browsers through www.browseraudit.com although im not sure how reliable the results are. I tend to stick with Browsers that score high 390's / 400.
In case you are wondering, Floorp scored a 400, while Zen scored a 397. Not bad at all
Weird that both taskbar icons for both browsers are the same? (Yellow circle with white "W" on it). Both were downloaded for linux, zipped.
(Yellow circle with white “W” on it)
thats the wayland icon, for whatever running it didnt map the icon
Floorp
Zen left dev mode on in prod so everyone using it was exposed and the dev played it down iirc
A dev made a mistake when the product was still in alpha and fixed it immediately after becoming aware of it. Let’s never use the product ever again!
I guess I didnt remember it correctly, and I do still use it after they fixed it. What's with the tone?
Not OP, Remember, it's hard to read true tone through text. It read to me is sarcasm, but not particularly spicy, and also not entirely inaccurate.
I do wish we could all have less tone issues. This place is getting a bit toxic, but fuck, it's still better than Reddit.
;)
I use Floorp, haven't tried Zen though. I remember some drama of Floorp temporarily closing it's source but I believe it's open source now. I like it for the side bar it comes with, it's pretty useful for multitasking but I guess you could just open two windows and place them side by side
It's indeed open source. No issues today.
I tried zen and then someone told me something concerning I forgot about by now so I switched back. Floorp I've never even heard of, but I'd have a hard time taking anything called that seriously.
Floorp is just cool
That only seems relevant if one uses the defaults, and if you care about privacy you probably don't, so idk what's the goal of this little experiment other than just curiosity.
It'd be a whole lot more useful if it was "here's the connections these browsers made after enabling all privacy-preserving settings they offer".
A lot of users care about privacy but find it unattainable due to technical difficulties.
That's my point, checking a few boxes in the settings is the bare minimum if you care about it, so idk what's the value in comparing defaults.
And privacy is often a tradeoff, if a browser doesn't have the strictest by default, it's probably because the ones who forked it didn't consider it a good tradeoff.
I use Zen for YouTube, and so does my producer. We don't use Floorp as of right now.