For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
What this essentially means is that the tricks and bypasses that were used to keep MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin and others alive will not work any more on Chrome, or at least not for very long. For example the Windows Registry mod that could extend MV2 availability will cease to function after Chromium version 151.
I in turn wouldn't call a project with 221 contributors a 1 man project :D
Commit history where you see the number of commits per developer tells a different story.
I mean, he is the main person working on the project, yeah. But someone has to take the lead. When I followed the project at the start, there were many people involved with new features and I also don't have much negative to say about Zen, for me it works fine.
Fair enough, you do what works for you.
I checked it out like, mid 2025 or so? Thought it looked somewhat cool, but within a week I was already hit with a few breaking changes and just things being changed around in the UI for no good reason, and the dev seemed to be just implementing things on the whims of what people were saying in the r/zen_browser subreddit. Also it seemed to be making a lot of big promises, but the big change seemed to be that the tabs were now ... on the left, and a couple of saner privacy presets in
about:configthat I was already setting in myuser.jsfile.Anyway, I do consider how a project is governed before I adopt an important piece of software. I'm fine with a one-man show for something as cute and small as a terminal emulator or an editor, but a browser is a different thing.
With it being a firefox fork, and not an independent project, and knowing that browser engines are complex things and that it is always going to be a constant struggle to keep it up-to-date and integrated with the changes pouring out of mozilla.org, the conclusion I drew was that it didn't feel like the best run project, and that I probably shouldn't put my eggs in that particular basket, waiting for the single dev to burn out or lose interest in it.
Jesus… how many devs does it take to do a 1 man project? /s