I don’t like Zen’s style of vertical tabs, and I don’t like the zen-specific extensions that can and do break when they move to new firefox versions.
I use Floorp with the settings set to “optimize for vertical tabs” while still using horizontal tabs, and then use the Sidebery extension for my vertical tabs.
Sidebery is available in the Zen extensions but it didn’t work as well the last time I tried it.
The one thing that I did really like about Zen was the split pane tabs.
SeaMonkey, which I use mainly for email. Otherwise I mostly use Chrome (or Supermium on Windows).
I would rather have to block the spyware functions in HOSTS or however else than fight with a browser that will not let me set it up how I need it. The last time I tried some ungoogled Chromium, I could not install the two extensions I need (UBlock and DarkReader) and without DarkReader my eyes burn and I can’t use the browser anyway.
At the very least, give us the choice to install whatever we want. I don’t mind if your choices are preinstalled. (I’d just as soon the lot of them were, saves me the trouble.)
I don’t recall which distro I was looking at, but recently I came across one that had no obvious way to install any browser not officially blessed by the distro.
I don’t much care which comes with the distro so long as I can install what I want without any extra hassle.