Zen was amazing when they first came to light, but they keep changing how workflows work, and it destroyed the workflow I had.

For example, I am a browser minimalist. I don’t need workspaces, and I don’t have thousands of tabs open, because that’s insane to me, personally. I now have to see the ugly Default Workspace at the top of my tab bar every time I go to open or switch tabs. This was an option before, so it was perfectly fine. They’ve taken that option away, which is very much not okay. Options are good. They also messed around with the New Tab icon, making it to where I couldn’t move it to the bottom where I prefer it to be, instead putting it at the top, which is extra movement needed to get to the top… They later added that back in, but again, why the fuck are you just willy nilly taking options away from people? It should just be an OPTION.

Anyway, I’ve had so many headaches with their approach to changing workflows that I don’t even recommend it to anyone any longer. I’m sure I’m just the crazy person who wants some of the offerings, while not being FORCED to use some of the others. :)

LLM usage is a part of it, but it’s not the only thing. They are moving more and more in a direction that they use your usage data for marketing I feel.

For example search suggestions, where they started tracking in which location you are searching for what and tell that third party advertisers, so that they can show you ads depending on your information. Additionally they also state very clear that they will handle personal information and location data and give that to third parties if you use advanced search. 

Another example is the “new tab” in which they show ads and sponsored content and track how you interact with that for showing you better ads. 

There are a lot of other features which will track behavior or usage, but you have to actively use them.

Then there is the debate about the “you grant us non exclusive, worldwide” rights to use your uploaded and typed in data discussion. Yes, they need to have rights to handle my data I input, but together with the ads stuff this smells fishy. Maybe more so because this is the first ever Terms of Use and all of that has been working without that in the past. 

In the meantime they set usage reports and studies active per default. You can disable it, but you have to know about that option. 

All of that is far from other browsers like Chrome and Edge but they seem to slowly change in a more ads-driven way. Firefox was basically surviving on google money the last decade, and that may stop, so we have to be extra careful.