Zen Browser is better than Brave, Arc, and Chrome, and I can’t recommend anything else

I play around with browsers quite a bit, and very few have managed to tear me away from Google Chrome. While I still dabble with Floorp and use it significantly more than other browsers that I’ve used, Zen Browser is one that I’ve been using for about a week now consistently. It’s the best browser that I’ve used, and no matter what browser you’re using, it’s worth giving a shot.

For users who were in love with Arc (and continued using it despite its security issues), Zen Browser is undoubtedly one of the best alternatives to switch to. The Browser Company has announced that Arc will be maintained with security updates and bug fixes, but when it comes to new features, there’s nothing else coming. Zen continues what Arc started, with a focus on usability and privacy.

Zen Browser is also open-source, compared to the closed-source Arc, and it’s based on the Gecko engine which powers Firefox.

Why I love Zen Browser

It’s a perfect combination of features

Zen Browser manages to combine the best of Floorp, Vivaldi, Firefox, and Chrome into one beautiful product that works phenomenally well. While I’ve seen people talk about bugs, those were months ago, and it seems to be the case that it’s a pretty stable browser these days. As my main browser, I haven’t come across any major issues, aside from when I first installed it and it was incredibly laggy. Once I closed and reopened it, it was completely fine.

Some of the features include:

• Huge amounts of customization
• Priority tabs that anchor to the top of your tab bar
• Pinned tabs, that are pushed to the top of your tab list
• Zen Glance (A feature that works like Little Arc)
• “Zen Mods” that add even more features
• Split views
• Workspaces

For example, one of the Zen Mods I installed is “Super URL bar”. This feature centers the text in the URL bar, rounds the edges, and removes the border by default. You can then tweak it further in the settings, so that you can change how it looks, including hiding icons, changing the colors, and more.

The developer has also been incredibly active on Reddit, adding features that users request. For example, changing the size of the tab bar was a popular request in an older thread asking for features, and the developer added the option to drag the tab bar to make it wider or smaller. People have also had success tagging the developer on other posts about the browser and requesting features.

In terms of other features, there are web panels which can be quickly accessed with a hotkey, and the ability to copy the current URL (in both regular or Markdown format) with a hotkey, too. I don’t know about you, but I send a lot of links to people, so being able to quickly copy the URL without needing to click the top URL bar actually saves me quite a bit of time. Even researching for articles that I write, it saves time because I can use my hotkeys to switch between my tabs, copy URLs, and more. There are other little things too, like pressing the new tab button brings up an overlay you can type into, showing your current page until you hit enter.

Zen Browser is all about making the experience seamless and easy, and it’s scratching an itch for me in a way that no other browser really has. I love Floorp, but something about Zen Browser has been incredible to use. Plus, its privacy options are fantastic. The browser itself collects no data, and all of the Mozilla tracking can be disabled. It can block social media trackers, fingerprinters, and more, and you can install extensions like uBlock Origin on top of that.

The only major downside that I’ve come across is that Zen Browser doesn’t support playing DRM-protected content. The developer is very open about this, as it requires a company of a significant size and a $5,000 fee. This browser is only developed by one person, and the cost is described as being “financially unreasonable” in its FAQ.

There’s one other major, major upside to using Zen Browser, and as I alluded to already, it’s that it moves away from the Chromium web rendering monopoly by using Mozilla’s Gecko.

The problem with Chromium and Brave

It all contributes to Google’s monopoly

Chromium is a fantastic browsing engine that forms the basis of many browsers out there, including Arc but also Brave, Edge, and Opera. With that said, as browsers continue to rely on Chromium as their rendering engine, that unwittingly hands control over to Google when it comes to the open internet. Even if it’s open-source, the reason Chromium works so well is that websites need to be optimized for it due to Google’s near-monopoly in rendering technology.

That’s why other browsers using other rendering tech, like Zen Browser using Gecko, are important. It increases the market share of other rendering engines and takes power away from Chromium in the sense that websites have to be built to support multiple engines, rather than just the one owned by Google. While you certainly can have a privacy-focused Chromium browser, the very nature of what Chromium is arguably goes against the ideals that would make a user want to use a privacy-focused browser in the first place.

When it comes to the likes of Brave specifically, that browser gets a lot of praise despite the fact that it doesn’t actually do much special. Even ignoring the Web3 things that are built on top of it, or the affiliate code placing (when affiliate codes are literally made to track user data and traffic sources), or the myriad of settings that users have to wade through, it’s still Chromium under the surface. Using Brave directly contributes to Google’s stronghold over web rendering.

Surprisingly, most people gloss over all of that, talking about it as if it’s the best browser out there. It’s just another Chromium-based browser at best, and a browser that directly goes against its privacy promises at worst. You can achieve most of what Brave does with regular extensions, without any of the added mess. Even when it comes to claims of speed (which Brave claims to be the “fastest browser“), all of them are similar enough that you realistically won’t notice the difference.

Zen Browser is my new favorite browser

It beats Floorp and Chrome for me

Zen Browser is my new favorite browser. It’s open-source, beautiful, and extensively modifiable. It bucks the trend of privacy-focused browsers still being built on Chromium which is a major plus, and it’s clear that the developer behind the project actually cares about their users. After all, it is just a hobbyist project being maintained by basically just one person.

if you’re looking for a new browser and aren’t sure where to start, give Zen a try. I’ve been loving it, and I can’t imagine going back to Chrome (or even Floorp, to an extent) since I made the switch.