Have you been looking for a better browser than Firefox? In this video, I take a deep dive into Zen Browser, a fast-growing Firefox-based browser that’s been gaining attention from Linux users, privacy enthusiasts, and power users alike.

We’ll take a detailed look at Zen Browser’s features, including Workspaces, Spaces, Split View, Glance, tab organization, and other productivity enhancements that help it stand out from traditional web browsers. I’ll also discuss some of the challenges Firefox has faced in recent years, Mozilla’s controversies, the impact of Google’s Manifest V3 changes, and why many users are searching for alternatives in the first place.

Why use another browser?

First, I want to address the obvious question — why not just use Firefox? It’s already installed on pretty much every major Linux distro, so what’s the problem?

Honestly, Firefox has really fallen behind over the years, and I don’t think that’s a controversial take at this point. It’s open-source, it’s secure, and the performance is fine — but in terms of features, it’s been getting lapped by the competition for years now.

The timeline speaks for itself. Chrome shipped tab groups in 2020. Firefox got them in 2025 — a five year gap. Split view has been in Edge for years; Firefox just added it earlier this year. And workspaces, which in my opinion is one of the most useful browsing features available today, still isn’t in Firefox at all natively — you’d need extensions and manual workarounds to approximate it.

Firefox just moves slowly, and by the time it catches up to where other browsers were years ago, those browsers have moved on to something else. For a project with Mozilla’s resources and history, that’s a pretty damning track record.

And that’s before getting into Mozilla’s management decisions, which have generated their own share of controversy and given people additional reasons to look elsewhere. I won’t go down that rabbit hole in this video, but it’s contributed to my own loss of confidence in the project’s direction.

So what have I been using instead? For a while it was Vivaldi — it has the feature set I was looking for, including workspaces and vertical tabs. But I kept running into a really frustrating issue where I’d lose my entire browsing session occasionally, and that’s just not something I’m willing to put up with. On top of that, Vivaldi isn’t fully open-source, which is another mark against it. I used it because it had what I needed, but I was never really happy with it and wouldn’t recommend it outright.

That’s what led me to finally give Zen a proper look. And I’m glad I did — because Zen is essentially what Firefox should have already become on its own. It takes Firefox as the base, keeps everything that’s good about it — the privacy story, the extension support, the Gecko engine — and layers on the modern UX and features that Firefox has been slow to deliver. The project was literally created to address Firefox’s shortcomings, so that framing isn’t just my opinion — it’s baked into why Zen exists.

Alright, let me show you how to install it.

Installation

Installation is about as straightforward as it gets. Head over to the Zen website, and the download page will detect your operating system and offer you the appropriate download. It’s available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

On Linux specifically, you have two options: AppImage or Flatpak. I’ve been using the Flatpak, which is what I use for pretty much all my GUI apps these days. If you’re not familiar with Flatpak, I’ll link a video in the description that covers it. Either way, both options are self-contained — no adding repositories or anything like that — so it’s a quick and painless install regardless of which distro you’re on.

Let’s take a look at what you get once it’s up and running.

What makes Zen stand out?

So is Zen actually any good? Yes — genuinely. Let me walk you through what I think makes it worth your attention.

The first thing worth highlighting is the engine under the hood. The majority of browsers today are Chromium-based — Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi — and while Chromium itself isn’t bad, having one engine dominate the entire browser landscape is unhealthy for the web. Standards get shaped by whoever controls the dominant engine, and right now that’s Google. Zen bucks that trend by building on Firefox’s Gecko engine, which means it’s contributing to actual browser diversity rather than just being another Chromium skin.

And that matters in a very practical way too. When Google rolled out Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions, one of the casualties was ad blocking — the new extension framework significantly limits what blockers like uBlock Origin can actually do in Chromium-based browsers. Since Zen is Firefox-based, it’s completely unaffected by that. uBlock Origin works exactly as it always has, with no restrictions. For anyone who takes ad blocking seriously — and I’d guess most of you watching do — that’s a meaningful difference.

And speaking of ads, at this point in the video you’ve probably seen a few from YouTube interrupt this video, but if you were a channel member or patron of Learn Linux TV, then you would’ve seen the ad-free version of this video – so feel free to support my content if you want to see fewer ads here too.

But anyway, my favorite feature in Zen is workspaces, and honestly the fact that Firefox still doesn’t have this natively is embarrassing at this point given that most other major browsers do.

The concept is simple: instead of one endless pile of tabs, you organize your browsing into separate workspaces by project or context. I have one for Learn Linux TV with all the tabs I use to manage the channel, one for system administration with my infrastructure dashboards and documentation, one for general browsing, and so on. When you switch between workspaces only the tabs for that workspace are visible — everything else is out of the way until you need it. Once you start using workspaces it’s genuinely hard to go back to managing everything in a single tab bar.

I’ll show you how workspaces work in Zen right now.

And beyond workspaces, Zen also has split view — the ability to display two pages side by side in the same window, which is great for referencing documentation while you work, or comparing two pages without constantly switching tabs.

It’s my primary browser now

So what’s my overall verdict on Zen? I like it enough that it’s become my default browser on all of my machines. That says a lot coming from someone who’s been pretty critical of the browser landscape lately.

That said, no browser is perfect — at least not for me. Every browser I’ve used checks some boxes but not all of them, and the one that comes closest for me right now is Zen. Let me walk you through how I got here.

Firefox is out for the reasons I already covered — feature velocity is too slow and I’ve lost confidence in Mozilla’s direction. Workspaces aren’t natively supported, and the hacky extension-based workarounds don’t cut it for me.

Chrome has more of what I need than Firefox does, but it’s made by Google, and given everything we know about Google’s relationship with user privacy and their Manifest V3 decisions, trusting them with my browser isn’t something I’m willing to do.

Vivaldi is actually the most feature-complete browser I’ve used — it has everything I need and then some. But it has two problems I can’t get past. First, it’s not fully open-source, and the developers have given some genuinely unconvincing justifications for why they haven’t opened it up. Second, I kept losing my entire browsing session at random, and that’s simply not something I’ll tolerate regardless of how good the feature set is.

That brings me to Zen. It doesn’t have quite as many features as Vivaldi, but it covers the majority of what I actually need day to day. The one area where it genuinely falls short right now is workspace syncing — even with sync enabled, workspaces don’t carry over between machines, which means recreating them manually on each install. Under normal circumstances that would be a dealbreaker for me. But the developers are actively working on it and it’s already on the roadmap, so I’m willing to be patient. And frankly, the fact that workspace sync is even on the roadmap puts Zen ahead of Firefox, which doesn’t have workspaces at all natively.

My only other complaint is minor — I’d prefer workspaces to be accessible as a dropdown rather than being pinned to the left panel the way Vivaldi does it. But that’s a UI preference, not a functional problem.

It’s also worth noting that Zen is still technically in beta. For a beta-stage browser it’s been remarkably solid in my experience, but it’s worth setting that expectation up front.

For those of you coming from Firefox, the most immediately obvious difference is going to be the UI. Zen has a completely custom interface that’s more modern and more thoughtfully laid out — it’s basically what Firefox would look like if Mozilla had actually been paying attention. The feature gap that Firefox has been failing to close for years, Zen went ahead and closed it themselves. That’s what the project was built to do, and in my opinion they’ve delivered.

When you first launch it you’ll go through an initial setup wizard, and from there you can dig into settings to tweak the appearance, configure sync, set your homepage, and so on. Sync works well across the board with the exception of workspaces, which again is a known issue that’s being worked on.

So if you’re looking for a browser for your Linux desktop that actually feels modern, supports the extensions you care about, and doesn’t have Google’s fingerprints all over it — Zen is absolutely worth switching to. And if your bar is just “something better than stock Firefox,” then honestly it clears that pretty easily.