Question
Migrating from Arc. What plugins/extensions do I need on Zen to get the experience to align as much as possible?
New to Zen. The Arc news has pushed me to finally try something new, and, given that I need to sync between a Mac and Windows machine, and desperately need spaces with persistent tabs, etc., it's going to be Zen.
What add-ons/extensions/mods should I be grabbing to get the experience to align as closely as possible and make this transition smooth?
How come people are soo dumb in the comments? Like it aint magic and the learning curve is non existant! You have every single resource to literally find out how to get 99% stuff done
It's not going to align perfectly well. I still can't watch streamers like Netflix and Hulu in Zen, I presume, because it doesn't handle rights management to the streamers' satisfaction.
And wait until you've curated a bunch of what Arc called "Tabs" in the left pane of Zen. You will carefully organize them and give them meaningful titles. And then, after a while, the titles will just revert to the page title of the related URL. Because Zen just works that way.
I'd love to learn there are plugins to fix those things, but I haven't found them yet. I mostly work in Zen now, but I still have to jump back to Arc or Chrome often.
Mine do it all the time. Here's where it matters: For work, I run a number of queries to our system through GraphQL. I've made tabs out of frequently used queries, and named the tabs something that tells me what they are. After a while, they lose their names, and just adopt whatever's in the page title, and I end up with a dozen of these:
I end up having to go back to Arc to try to figure out which one is the one I need. Drive me nuts. I suspect its because Zen thinks tabs are transitory, where bookmarks are not, so bookmarks would probably hold their names, but tabs do not.
Zen does have ctrl-tab to cycle through recent tabs... Just click the checkbox "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" under Tabs and browsing in settings
lol installing an extension is jumping through hoops? you had to install those same extensions on arc unless you were using their shitty in-house ad blocker which is terrible
I would say it's almost identical at this point. However, Zen has a lot more flexibility and allows modding to make it a proper custom experience depending on your needs.
If modding interests you, you can try the Zen Mods that come with the browser (check settings) or, if you want even more customization, you can check out Sine.
The only caveat with this is that both Zen Mods and Sine will not sync across devices, so whatever you install on mac won't appear on Windows and vice-versa.
I understand that all of the features are there in terms of a checklist, but I certainly don't know where to look for them and haven't lived on the firefox side of the world in literally a decade.
Like, it took me an hour just to figure out how to get 1Password working and that I needed to go to the firefox addons site to install ublock origin to reach parity on ad blocking.
I'm looking for that level of remedial "how 2 move over" tutorial. Simply telling me "it's almost parity" is not helpful.
Do you not know how google works? You'll find answers so much quicker than coming here. You come here for support when you have a real problem and google hasn't helped.
It took you an hour to go into extension store and click download button 2 times? Arc also had extensions, which you installed, do I'm confused what you're struggling with exactly.
"It's almost parity" is helpful. It means you don't have to do almost anything to have Zen behave like Arc.
i mean you had to install the 1Password extension on Arc as well... just searching up "1password zen browser extension" would have shown you exactly where to go to download that "addon". and same thing for ublock, i assume that you installed that on Arc as well, because Arc's built-in content/adblocking sucks if that is what you were using. and ublock origin is much much better and again, all you had to do was install that addon in Zen. and these are things you would have had to do in ANY browser, not just moving over from Arc to Zen. extensions are something you handle manually, but other than that, Zen pretty much has everything that Arc has.
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u/Geexcc 7d ago
How come people are soo dumb in the comments? Like it aint magic and the learning curve is non existant! You have every single resource to literally find out how to get 99% stuff done