Recently saw a streamer talk about this, and not a tech streamer or anything. She didn’t get quite all the details right, but I think that’s the massive fuckup of Google here: If you don’t get the details right, your interpretation is simply that Google is killing ad blocking.

She’s actually using Opera and understands that it’s Chromium-based, so her takeaway was that Firefox might be the only option left.
In that vein, she also talked about how Google Search is now just ads and bad results, and when someone mentioned DuckDuckGo, she responded that she’s been genuinely been thinking about switching.

Like, damn, I know Google is big and this alone won’t kill them. But her talking about it still felt like the initial drop before the rollercoaster goes downhill. I don’t think, I’ve heard a non-techie talk so negatively about Google, possibly ever…

I tried Zen again after this article and it’s improved a lot since 2 months ago.

I’m still missing some keybinds (some keybinds I used on Vivaldi are not available, and some keybinds that are available (workspace switching) don’t seem to work),

also missing my custom theme from Vivaldi (I might just fork a Zen theme and make it that way) ,

and I still have some issues regarding the ability to remove the top bar (namely, when getting the URL bar with Ctrl-L, it calls the entire top bar instead of just the URL bar, and I can’t seem to make that disappear with just ESC. Sometimes it just hangs there no matter what I do, just for the sake of being annoying. Also, it’s not even disabled, just hidden and if you accidentally hover over the top of the window, it’s back! Absolutely infuriating!)

but other than that, it’s pretty great!

It’s actually quite impressive for Alpha software. What’s with 2024 and super stable Alphas of projects that make power user capabilities accessible and easy to use for everyone? First, COSMIC DE and now Zen Browser!

Edit: Update on these issues:

Missing Keybinds: They are all already reported as Github issues.

Workspaces keybinds issue: Caused by an already-reported issue that websites seem to take priority and grab every keybind before the browser, meaning I had to use one of the worst key combinations I’ve ever used (Win+Alt+{num}), for workspace switching. UPDATE: Trying Ctrl+{num}, we’ll see if that works.

Custom Theme: I tried to remake it using Mozilla’s tools and getting it up on the addons store but Mozilla removed it cuz it was too similar to another theme? Even though I literally created it? Weird. I couldn’t be bothered to deal with their bullshit so I forked a Zen theme that someone else had made and based it on that, with custom firefox css.

The top bar issue is still there, not sure what I can do about it.

They aren’t killing it. They’re just shuffling it off their platform. Move to Firefox, Ladybird, or Zen Browser. Theres plenty of alternatives. Hopefully Servo makes a comeback