Having switched to Zen Browser, something I miss with Firefox was its stability. I find myself looking up Zen browser bugs and workarounds too much. This is the 2nd or 3rd time I’m downgrading Zen versions due to a bug in the stable version, I never had to do so during my years on Firefox. Devs on Github making an app on their free time have can’t spend as long on QA as a multi-mullion dollar organization.
Never.
This is the 2nd or 3rd time I’m downgrading Zen versions due to a bug in the stable version
They haven’t released a stable yet and are clearly labelled as beta releases. Maybe there’s a hint why it’s unstable.
I’ve never needed to downgrade Firefox.
I’ve never had to downgrade Firefox, most of the time I don’t even notice its been updated unless it pops up a “Welcome to Firefox vSomething” page which it hardly ever does.
I did try out Zen, and its certainly an interesting browser, but there’s a couple of issues with it that I have:
- It’s a browser that is as far as I understand, maintained by one person - I learned a while ago not to use critical software that is only maintained by one person
- It’s still in alpha, and things change very quickly with it. Unlike Firefox I do notice when Zen updates because some behavior will have heavily changed. A few weeks ago there was an update for example that completely removes the new tab page (pressing Ctrl + T or the new tab icon just opens the URL bar and then when you submit your address/query then it navigates directly to it in a new tab). Interesting change for sure, I’m not sure I dislike it but that is a major behavior to change in an update with no prompt about it being updated, and it wasn’t togglable in the settings menu - you had to go to
about:config
to change it back. When I looked at the GitHub issue regarding this, the dev seemed a bit… unhappy with people’s reaction, to put it lightly. - Because its still in alpha, there can be stability issues like you mentioned; I recently finally switched back to Firefox when I noticed for some reason Zen was causing my GPU to run in high power mode and using high utilization as if I were running a game and dragging the rest of my system down. Thought maybe I’d left a video running in a tab somewhere and that it was just HW accelerated decoding, but nope.
Obviously those last two points as mentioned are more understandable because the browser is in an alpha stage, but browsers are for better or worse very critical pieces of software. I can’t have it just randomly crashing out on me, or behavior changing out from under me every week. This combined with people selling Zen as if its the next coming of Christ has kinda left a bad taste in my mouth for it. Don’t get me wrong, what the dev has pulled off is incredibly impressive and major props to them for it, but I’ll be waiting for it to leave the alpha stage until I’m able to daily drive it. For now I’m just back on regular mainline Firefox.
Be careful doing that as you may very well be undoing security patches
Never had to downgrade. Never had any problem
Never.
Never had to downgrade FF. However, I HAVE had to install an older FF theme on a newer FF because information density reigns king on my screen.
I use lepton - Photon style: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/tree/photon-style
I’ve been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic, and I don’t recall ever having needed to downgrade.
The only time I did was WAY back during the launch of Firefox Quantum. It was a huge back-end change pushed overnight to the main branch, breaking most extensions including one I similar couldn’t live without at the time. I even switched to PaleMoon for a while until everything sorted itself out.
Been using LibreWolf for almost 2 years now which does a good job at gutting all the parts of Firefox updates I don’t want.
I know it was a long time ago but I would avoid Palemoon like the plague going forward. They don’t seem to care about security and the browser is highly vulnerable.
Never
Zen is in beta. You should expect instability.
How often do you downgrade Firefox versions
I don’t remember ever downgrading a browser (started out on NCSA Mosaic).
Having switched to Zen Browser
Recently tried Zen – I think it’s pretty and shows promise but has a few dealbreakers that preclude my using it as a daily driver. TL;DR: “I slightly prefer the zen UI but not enough to overcome the annoyances. I’ll check back on the project next year if it’s still active.”
Never, but I recently switched to Zen so idk if I’ll find myself doing that in a few weeks/months too.