---
title: 'Ramblings on the Zen Browser'
pubDate: '5/30/25'
tags: ['Tech', 'Apps']
---

I’ve been using the Zen Browser for a little over a month now. I was introduced to it via a co-worker during a screen share, and I pretty much instantly fell in love. It’s got its share of issues, but it’s served as an excellent replacement for Arc, which is now (for abundantly stupid reasons) a dead product.

Between Arc and Zen, I was using Vivaldi. I found the UI extremely clunky and frankly pretty ugly. And I had grown used to the idea of the collapsible sidebar of tabs, as well as different browsing contexts, things that fundamentally changed how I use a web browser. While Vivaldi had similar functionality, it was, not surprisingly, clunky and unintuitive.

That’s not to say Zen doesn’t have its share of clunkiness at times, it’s definitely not as polished as Arc was. But it’s always improving, and, even at its clunkiest, it’s nowhere near as unpleasant as Vivaldi’s UX. But it works great 95% of the time, and that’s quite impressive for a relatively young open-source project that’s not backed by a big tech company.

Unlike Arc, and indeed unlike most browsers these days, Zen doesn’t use Chromium for its rendering engine. Instead, it uses Gecko, which is maintained by Mozilla, and used in their Firefox browser. This may be a downside for a lot of people, it’s not the most cutting edge in terms of web standards, but if it helps bring renewed interest in rendering engines not made by Apple or Google I see that as a major plus – I’ll spare the lecture on why I believe Chromium has become far too ubiquitous.

On the web dev side, I’ve found the developer tools to be…fine. I’ve used the Firefox dev tools in the past, so I’m comfortable with them, and it didn’t take me long to adjust. While I much prefer the Chromium dev tools (which is about the only thing I _like_ about Chromium), I don’t find the Gecko dev tools that much worse. Which is more than I can say about Safari’s dev tools. 😬

Another major positive is battery life. I’d become somewhat used to the less-than-ideal battery life I was getting with Arc, and slightly less so than Vivaldi. But after switching to Zen, I started to notice my battery was lasting quite a bit longer. As I write this (with Zen open in the background), my M2 MacBook Air is at about 88% battery, with 11 hours remaining. I know in practice it won’t *actually* last 11 hours, but that’s higher than any estimation that I can recall ever getting using a Chromium-based browser. In practice, it means that, generally, depending on which Node environments I have to run locally that day, I can make it through an entire 8 hour workday, with a bit to spare.

The biggest downsides are the inability to access DRM’d content online, specifically on streaming services (I’ve been swapping to Safari to get my Andor and Doctor Who fix), and the fact that the iCloud Keychain extension doesn't work (though I've heard through the internet grapevine a fix is coming). Also, the fun – and I will admit, relatively obnoxious – animations on this site do not work, but that should be remedied whenever Firefox fully implements the View Transition API.

All in all, my experience with the Zen Browser has been positive, and, barring any unforeseen changes, I see myself sticking with it for the long haul. Or, at least until a shiny new browser pops up. 😅
