A Week Of Using Zen Browser

Chrome is pretty standard at this point. But for some of us we still swear with Mozilla's Firefox. Even though it was dethroned from the top spot it once enjoyed it is still a very good web browser. It's privacy features are way better than those of Google Chrome. It's rendering, disregarding the slow page load speeds, is better than Chrome's. This post is not about Firefox ... but one of its latest forks: Zen Browser. Inspired by the now defunct Arc Browser but this time riding on a Firefox base, it brings some interesting features that were once confined to Arc's Chromium base. After using the browser for the last one week we can say that it is just the perfect "successor" to Firefox.

Zen's UI is highly polished. A translucent default screen pops up when you first open it. It gives off a Mac-inspired glassy interface that makes it look luxurious. By default the tabs sidebar is open but you can toggle it out by either toggling the 'Compact Mode' or choosing the "Compact Mode" style in its settings. The address bar seats neatly at the top and when you click into it it floats to the center of the screen. This is an interesting feature.

Zen comes with features like "Folders" and "Workspaces" where you can organize links and tabs into. 

Its "Essentials" feature on its sidebar allows one to add tabs that one deems important. A limit of 12 tabs can placed in this.

Zen comes with vertical tabs layout only. This might surprise the average internet user who is accustomed to horizontal tabs. Vertical tabs are not new; they are being steadily introduced by other web browsers (Firefox introduced them in 2025). The vertical tabs layout allows better organization of open tabs than the horizontal layout. Zen Browser's vertical tabs are contained in a sidebar whose position can be switched via the "Settings" page. 

This is where Zen shines better than Mozilla Firefox. Zen loads pages faster than Firefox. We would even risk and say its page loading speed is better than that of Google Chrome. Its rendering is at par with Firefox; the 'box-shadows' and 'border-radius' are crisp and clean (better than Chrome again). It has better memory usage than both Chrome and Firefox, something which we found surprising for a small-team developed browser. We've opened many tabs and windows on it and there has been no sluggishness on its performance. Perhaps, we could attribute it to Windows' "Efficiency Mode" saving the situation but we have seen Windows place Firefox in "Efficiency Mode" for even a smaller number of tabs opened.

Currently, Zen has binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux. But there is no portable archive just yet. It's still in BETA but very usable. 

Since Zen is a Firefox fork it has access to Firefox's extensive Extensions marketplace. You can install any Firefox Addon on it and it will still work. Also Zen comes with its own "mods" that add special capabilities to the browser which are not covered by Firefox's extensions.

Online Privacy is now a thing and there are calls to have it in-built at the browser level. By default Zen uses its "Standard" protection which also offers "DNS over HTTPS" capability right out-of-the-box. One can still select if they want more stricter or lax privacy rules right from the browser's settings page.

Zen is perfect. We envision it as one of Firefox's forks that could go toe-to-toe with the industry standard, Google Chrome. If you are looking to break out of Chrome's stranglehold or want to use a "better version of Firefox" then Zen Browser is the answer. It's vertical tabs layout can improve one's productivity once one gets a hang of it. The UI, especially when "Compact Mode" is toggled on, allows one to see more web page content with minimal distractions. And judging from its efficient RAM usage it seems to be a good fit for under-powered machines. 

But all in all, it still has some few negatives:

• the browser is still in BETA stage i.e. it's still at that stage where it is not fully ready for mass consumption. This does NOT mean it is unusable. It is. But because of its BETA stage and its small development team it can be turn off to people who care about continuity and stability.
• handling the vertical tabs layout can be daunting for new users. This can curtail the wider adoption of Zen. And there is no way you can configure the browser to use horizontal tabs.
• opening a "New Window" on Zen can be surprising if one fails to notice the little dropdown at the top of the browser.
• the floating search field/address bar can be surprising to new users.
• it does not have a mobile app just yet.

Overall, we like it. If you want to try out a new way of web browsing then Zen can give you a different approach.