Right now is the best period of time yet for Firefox-based browser, especially when most alternative browsers are Chrome-based.
While there are a bunch of forks like Librewolf and Palemoon, they provide features mainly for power users like hardened privacy and tweaked user-prefs. A year ago the only fork I knew of, based on recent stable versions of Firefox and added productivity features on top was Floorp. I was very surprised at the hype and sudden popularity of Zen Browser in the past few months and have been curious why it grew so much faster than Floorp which has been around for much longer, look at the Github star graph: https://star-history.com/#zen-browser/desktop&Date. Zen Browser currently has 19.3K stars while Floorp has 6.1K.
Reasons I can think of are the following: heavy promotion of the browser by the devs and community on places like Reddit along with emphasizing its ‘zen’ philosophy, really fast development (it now has way more features than Floorp), and the Zen mods store, where you can install CSS mods.
What are your thoughts and reasons for Zen Browser becoming so popular so fast? (while its not mainstream, it did grow fast in among Firefox and power users)
It’s properly open-source that means objectively better than Floorp and it has a neat plugin/theme system.
Floorp is fully open source too, they even have documentation for compiling it: https://docs.floorp.app/docs/building/
It’s pretty. By default, even. Floorp is customizable, but many (most) people want a tool that works directly out of the box, and if it looks good while doing it, then it will be more popular.
The dev advertised it on Reddit, then when people complained about issues, you would see a response from them along the lines of “fixed,” which showed responsiveness, and I think that gained loyalty before the product was ready to be released.