나는 드디어 새로운 브라우저를 찾았다: Zen 브라우저

작년부터 브라우저 문제로 어려움을 겪었던 유튜버가 여러 브라우저를 비교 평가한 후, 커뮤니티 중심의 오픈소스 브라우저인 Zen을 최종 선택했습니다.  Zen은 사용자 의견을 적극 반영하고 지속적인 개선을 통해 사용자 맞춤 설정이 가능한 최고의 브라우저 경험을 제공한다는 점을 강조합니다.

### 새로운 브라우저, Zen으로의 이전 (그리고 Arc의 실패)
* 🗣️ 지난 1년간 여러 브라우저 사용 후 **Arc 브라우저의 심각한 성능 저하(배터리 소모 6배 증가)**와 개발팀의 무관심으로 인해 실망감을 표출했습니다.
* 💻 Arc 브라우저의 문제점을 공개적으로 지적했고, 많은 사용자들이 동일한 문제를 경험했다고 언급했습니다.  "VC 투자를 받았지만 사용자의 의견을 무시하는 브라우저" 라고 비판했습니다.
* 🤔 Chrome의 안정성과 생태계는 좋지만, **개인화 설정 부족**으로 인해 Chrome을 사용하지 않았습니다. Brave, Edge 등 다른 브라우저들의 단점(커스터마이징 부족, 성능 저하 등)도 지적했습니다.
* 🛠️  **개인화 설정(수직 탭 바, UI 최소화, 단축키 커스터마이징 등)**을 위해 다양한 브라우저들을 시도했지만, Vivaldi에서도 단축키 충돌 및 트랙패드 제스처 미지원 문제로 어려움을 겪었습니다.
* 💡 Vivaldi의 사용자 의견 무시, 그리고 자체 브라우저 제작 시도 후 어려움을 깨닫고,  **Zen 브라우저**를 최종적으로 선택했습니다.
* 👍 Zen 브라우저는 **오픈소스**, **커스터마이징 가능**, **활발한 커뮤니티**를 갖추고 있으며, 개발팀의 적극적인 사용자 소통에 깊은 인상을 받았습니다.
* ✨ Zen 브라우저의 장점(단축키 설정,  Zen Mods를 통한 브라우저 자체 커스터마이징)을 강조하며,  **사용자 중심의 개발 방식**에 대한 높은 만족도를 표현했습니다.
* 🎉 결론적으로,  **Zen 브라우저를 추천**하며,  개발팀에 대한 지지와 앞으로의 발전에 대한 기대감을 드러냈습니다.

I need to be really honest with you guys; I've had a rough time with browsers over the last year. Arc was great, and I think

it's fair to say that was because I'm far from the only person having massive problems with it, in particular,

performance issues. My wonderful M2 MacBook Pro Max—whatever the heck the specs are on it—that used to get 8 to 10 hours

of battery, gets less than two if I have Arc open. When I complained about it publicly, I was far from the only one

having these issues. I need to emphasize how absurd the battery drain is, though. We're talking six times more being used,

less than Chrome was doing. I was going mad! I was trying to get work done in Uber, and my laptop's fans had spun up

and it was falling apart. And when I went and checked what the browser company and Arc were up to, they hadn't posted anything

other than icons in, like, a year. Even the icon posts were November. It's clear that this browser is actually dead, and

everybody who was mad at me for saying this earlier was wrong. Arc is dead, and I am genuinely sorry to anybody who

started using it based on my recommendations. I will say I have lost a lot of credibility in recommending

browsers, which means you shouldn't use this as an end-all, be-all; the right place to go if you want the best possible

browser. But I need to write some of my wrongs here: recommending a VC-funded browser that hates its users, that has no

interest in fixing the problems that they caused. It is specifically continuously dodging the opportunities to own it, fix it, or just open-source it.

So I am frustrated. I have done everything from trying browsers that are ancient that were customizable to

building my own, and I think I finally landed somewhere good. But before we can get there, a quick word from today's

Today's sponsor is for those of us tired of making backend decisions. Even I'm starting to get to that point.

Convex is the all-in-one platform to solve most of your backend problems, and it's open source.

Everything from server functions to vector search, cron jobs, file storage, type safety, and more. It's just a good experience to work with.

I've been really impressed. I'll show you with a quick demo. This is an app I'm running on localhost; it's one of their templates, and it's really cool.

I'm going to send a message: "Please subscribe." It basically instantly appeared in the other browser. It's a different browser; I wanted to show you this isn't doing some weird stuff locally.

This is actually server-side sync. So what does the code look like? It's got to be really complex, right?

Well, here in our real codebase, it's just inside our Next.js application. We have a folder named `convex`. In this folder, we have our list query.

It has no arguments, has a handler which will hit `context.db.query` for messages, order by send, take 100. Then you just return a promise. It's written in traditional TypeScript.

The mutation looks pretty much the same. If you're curious about the database definitions, here's the schema. That's the whole thing.

Yes, it is actually that easy. You've now seen pretty much all the backend code. Where is the complexity? Is it hidden in the app?

Let's look. We have `messages = useQuery(api.messages.list)`. That looks familiar; it's kind of like tRPC.

And sure as hell, if you command-click it, it brings you right to the backend code. Best DX ever! And it makes sure that if you make a change somewhere, it hydrates throughout your whole app, and you'll see type errors where they are.

actually happen, and now you get free sync. You literally just call the query, and now it will automatically

update; you're done. How cool is that? If you want the best TypeScript-first solution for your backend, it's pretty

hard to beat Convex. Check them out today. So, dling SLC Convex...

As I saw how many people were having problems and how little work was being done fixing them, I started once again investigating all my

alternatives. I made a quick list of the ones that people recommend the most and why they are not what I'm looking for.

Obviously, the gold standard is Chrome. It's stable, well-supported, and has a good ecosystem, but it has none of the

customizability that I'm looking for. Now, not that I customized Arc a ton—hell, I barely even used half the features—but I

have fallen in love with a couple of key things: like the sidebar, like not having the top of the browser have this giant

bar on it that takes up a third of my vertical space on my small screen; like having hotkeys that actually make sense

for a bunch of things. I missed all of that so much that I just couldn't do Chrome. I tried; I couldn't. I'll be honest,

I still think most people should probably just use Chrome. And if you haven't gotten addicted to these custom

UI's and workflows yet, don't. It's like getting an SSD where you don't realize how slow hard drives were until you have

one, and now you can't live without it anymore. So, honestly, don't dive down this rabbit hole if you could avoid it

because it will make you unhappy for the rest of your life. Speaking of unhappy, we need to talk about Brave,

because I do not genuinely understand how anyone recommends this browser. It runs like—it looks like—it's full of web; it doesn't

Have any customization whatsoever; you have no control over the hotkeys. You can't even set a hotkey for opening and

closing the sidebar. I don't. All Brave is, is a web3-skinned, worse Chrome with a

sidebar, and at least you can get it without the web3 skin if you use Edge. So I guess the most reasonable

recommendation to get some of this functionality is probably Edge, but there is zero customization of hotkeys in it

at all. I was blown away by how little control you have in Edge, considering how much different it is. I couldn't get it

to do any of the things I wanted it to do. Cool that it had vertical tabs, like if I open it quick, uh,

Edge. Certainly you can tell it's a Chromium/Electron base with the speed of opening. Like, it looks fine; this

animation when you hover is the worst thing ever. It's super—that's not just the compression or my video; it

is that janky. It just looks awful, especially on high refresh rate screens. You can't really hide; you can't

make this top bar go away, and we're losing so much real estate from that. It's sad, but it's better than Brave's low

bar. But honestly, personally, I would just use Chrome. Like, this isn't a big enough win, especially with how ugly that

sliding is and the fact that you can't hotkey to pin/unpin it, which is all I

want. If I could have a hotkey that hit that button, I probably would have given Edge a real shot. But after seeing how

much the team downplayed the needs of people in their forums, I just stopped caring. Next, we have Zen, which is very

customizable and very close to what I want, but it's Firefox-based, which is probably the biggest flaw. It's still

early and has problems, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit. And as far as I understood at the time, the battery

life and the performance weren't great. We'll come back to Zen. Speaking of Zen, Firefox—we're going to move on. I wrote

down this list of the specific things I wanted: a vertical tab bar, the ability to hide everything for a simple UI like

what I have on the screen now, where all I have open is the website, and I have the little, like, border around, which is

fine. A command-shift-C to copy the current URL. I cannot tell you how much this is important to me; the regularity in which

I am copying a URL to put it in my notes, to send it to somebody, to put it somewhere else—it is a constant thing. I

am doing this at least 20 times a day, probably more. And multiple hotkeys to select the thing and then copy from it—

not acceptable. I could not tolerate that, especially because of how slow that flow was in all the browsers I tried it with.

I also need a hotkey to toggle the sidebar. I would like it to be Chrome-based, and I want the performance to not

suck. There is a browser that hit all of these things, and it has the world's most ugly browser icon: Vivaldi. And I was

surprised. It genuinely seemed like Vivaldi was going to be the right browser for me. I had no way to hide the

top bar, which was sad but tolerable. I could set my hotkey for the sidebar and disable the animation on it. I could put

it on the right, which was a nice benefit—couldn't do that with Arc. I was feeling pretty good. It was ugly as sin, but with

a little bit of customization, I could make it tolerable-looking. I was still sad I couldn't get rid of the top bar,

but, like, whatever. But there were a couple things I couldn't deal with. The first was the quick copy, which I got

working, and I'm actually really impressed with the level of customization you can do in here. The

quick commands in Vivaldi are incredible, and I created one: copy current URL. It focuses the address bar, it has a 10

millisecond delay, it copies the content, it has another 10-millisecond delay, and then it focuses the page. And then I

bound this in the keyboard layer to be a hotkey: copy current URL, command-shift-C. And this works great. You'll see that

little flicker up there; that's because I copied the URL, and it's there. Awesome! I was reviewing a PR a few days ago; I'll

find a random upload thing—one—and I was in the pull request; I was looking through files and I wanted to send them to

somebody on my team, so I command-shift-C, and I guess it's working now. I don't know why, because when I tried this

yesterday, I couldn't, because the hotkey conflicted with the page. And Vivaldi will prioritize the page's hotkeys over

yours, always—even the ones built into the browser. So if you happen to have a hotkey that some random website has as

one that you use regularly, you will not be able to use that hotkey on that website. One of the killers for me was

Excalidraw, because I bind command-shift-E as my open/close, and command-shift-E is export in Excalidraw, so I cannot close

my sidebar with a hotkey when I have Excalidraw open. And there is no option anywhere in Vivaldi to change this, and

this is when I learned something very valuable about Vivaldi: they don't really care about what their users want. I have

read enough of the forums now to be very confident and very certain of that statement: they don't give a damn. And

that goes one layer deeper, because one of the things that they *do* care about is laptop users. I don't know what

Went wrong. I feel like I just went down the craziest rabbit hole, which is what happens whenever I screw with Vivaldi.

The quick form of what I want to say is that swipe gestures did not work in Vivaldi, and it was my understanding that

nobody who contributes to Vivaldi uses a laptop with a trackpad, so they were not

interested at all. What they prefer are their very strange mouse gestures, which, as far as I know, cannot work on Mac

because the way their mouse gestures work is you hold down right-click and you move the mouse some way to trigger

something. So they have: you can go back by holding that right-click and moving to the left. I hate this, and honestly, if

I do come back, I don't want this on; I'm turning it off. The more painful thing

here is that they don't really support trackpad gestures. I know that because yesterday I went insane trying to get my

swipe back and forward working, and I couldn't. And when I read through their forums, it seemed like it just doesn't

support gestures for backward swiping.  Just starting to use Vivaldi on my laptop. Really like it, but my laptop's touchpad gesture

swiping with two fingers doesn't seem to work. Reading other posts, it's not implemented in Vivaldi. Is this real? It's a crucial

feature on a laptop. It's always been a strange oversight. Yeah, it's strange. So for these people, it didn't

work. What you have to do, and what I had done—and I don't know why it's behaving

I'm Finally Moving On (I have a new browser)

Hi, I'm a software dev nerd mostly known for full stack TypeScript stuff. Check out me and my stack at t3.gg


Theo - t3․gg

Arc 브라우저 사용 경험과 문제점

지난 1년간 Arc 브라우저 사용 중 심각한 성능 저하 및 배터리 소모 문제 발생

M2 MacBook Pro 사용 시 Arc 브라우저 실행 시 배터리 소모가 Chrome보다 6배 이상 증가

많은 사용자가 동일한 문제를 경험

Arc 브라우저 개발사의 미흡한 대응 및 업데이트 부재

Arc 브라우저의 사실상 서비스 종료 선언 및 사용자에게 사과

다른 브라우저 사용 경험 및 비교

Chrome, Brave, Edge, Zen 등 다양한 브라우저 사용 경험 공유

Chrome: 안정적이고 지원이 좋지만 사용자 정의 기능 부족

Brave: 성능 저하 및 사용자 정의 기능 부족

Edge: 일부 기능은 좋지만 사용자 정의 기능 부족, 특히 단축키 설정 제한적

Zen: 사용자 정의 기능은 좋지만 Firefox 기반이라는 단점 존재

Vivaldi 브라우저 사용 경험 및 문제점

Vivaldi: 사용자 정의 기능이 우수하지만 상단 바 제거 불가능

Vivaldi의 강력한 사용자 정의 기능 (빠른 명령어)을 이용한 URL 복사 단축키 설정

웹 페이지 단축키가 브라우저 단축키보다 우선순위를 가지는 문제점 발생

트랙패드 제스처 미지원 및 사용자 의견에 대한 무관심

트랙패드 제스처 문제 해결을 위한 확장 프로그램 사용 경험

직접 브라우저 개발 시도 및 어려움

직접 브라우저 개발 시도: Electron 사용, 탭 격리 문제 등의 어려움 직면

보안 및 성능 문제 해결의 어려움으로 인한 개발 중단

Zen 브라우저 선택 이유: 사용자 중심의 개발 방식, 뛰어난 커스터마이징 기능

Vivaldi보다 모든 면에서 개선된 성능 및 사용 경험 제공

활발한 커뮤니티 활동 및 개발팀의 적극적인 소통

URL 복사 단축키 추가 및 기타 개선 사항

Zen Mods를 통한 브라우저 자체 커스터마이징 기능 강조