Chrome is an excellent browser. Even if you don’t want Chrome specifically, you could pick one of the other Chromium browsers that are actually worth switching to, like Edge, and still keep all the goodies without handing everything to Google.
But if you don’t want Chromium at all, Firefox is a great option. It’s reliable, open-source, and privacy-focused, but kind of boring with slower feature releases. Zen Browser, on the other hand, uses Firefox’s Gecko engine but looks nothing like it and offers all the quality-of-life features you’d expect from a browser in 2026. After a couple of weeks with this browser, I think it’s a different browsing experience altogether, and a better one at that.
Zen moves everything to the left and then hides it
The first thing you notice with Zen Browser is that the tabs are on the left side. While plenty of browsers, including Microsoft Edge, offer vertical tabs, Zen also lets you choose whether the sidebar stays visible all the time or only when you need it.
Toggle Compact mode from the corner, and the entire sidebar slides out of view. It comes back when you hover near the left edge, and the rest of the time you get an unobstructed view of the web page you are looking at. While the top bar does show a bookmark bar, it’s easy to permanently hide it, unlike Chrome.
It took me a day or two to adjust. With all the browser navigation hidden, I kept minimizing the window out of habit, forgetting I was in a browser at all. If that bothers you, there’s a Sidebar and top toolbar option in settings that brings the address bar back up top. But once you get used to the full-screen feel, going back to a traditional browser layout feels cramped.
Pinned tabs that stay put
Essentials and Spaces keep your everyday sites one click away
I’m the kind of person who runs more than 20 tabs at a time in multiple browsers, and I’d bet at least some of them are duplicates I opened because I forgot the original was buried somewhere in the row. Zen fixes that with two features: Essentials and Spaces.
Essentials is a dedicated strip at the top of the sidebar where your everyday sites live permanently. Asana, YouTube, Slack, GitHub- drag a tab in once and it stays put. It doesn’t vanish when you close it or get lost among thirty other tabs. Spaces sits below it and works as a second tier: pinned tabs you need later rather than constantly.
Other browsers let you group or pin tabs too, but it usually involves a right-click, a submenu, and some dragging. Zen gives the important stuff its own visible real estate, and you drag and drop into the sidebar. There’s also a media player pinned at the bottom of the sidebar, so you always know which tab is playing audio without hunting for it.
Glance and split view
A pop-over window for quick checks and side-by-side browsing
Another useful addition to Zen is Glance, which offers a way to quickly interact with external links in your email by opening them in a small window layered on top of the page you’re already on. It’s useful to check your package tracking, see whether it’s out for delivery, and close the window.
Split view is what you find from there. A Glance window has three buttons on its edge: close, expand into a full tab, and a third one that tiles the browser. Click it, and the window splits in two. You can run up to four tabs side by side in a single window and drag the dividers to resize. Normally you’d drag a tab out into its own window and position it manually. Here it stays in one place and behaves like a tiling window manager built into the browser.
Mods for everything else
Mods in Zen aren’t browser extensions. They’re community-made tweaks to how the browser itself looks and works, all browsable on Zen’s own mods page.
Most of these mods are cosmetic, but some do offer fixes for some quirks with the browser. For instance, Better Find Bar centers Firefox’s awkwardly wide find bar and matches it to your theme. Then, Unloaded Tab Indicator greys out tabs that the browser has put to sleep to save memory, so you can tell at a glance which ones are still eating resources. And finally, Super Pins gives you full control over the Essentials strip to customize its size, spacing, text alignment, and locking it in place so it doesn’t scroll away in a long tab list.
What’s more, if you don’t find a mod that you want, you can write the CSS yourself. That’s the real upside of open source here, and you probably don’t need to be a Software Engineer to write a mod with the help of any frontier AI models.
The Netflix problem
No DRM support means no streaming on Windows or macOS
I don’t use my browser to stream Netflix, Disney+, or Amazon Prime Video, but if you do, there’s a catch. Zen can’t play DRM-protected content. Netflix, Spotify, and anything else locked behind digital rights management won’t stream, because Zen doesn’t have a Widevine DRM license yet.
Those licenses come from essentially three companies, including Microsoft (PlayReady), Apple (FairPlay), and Google (Widevine). Almost every browser that isn’t Safari or Edge runs Widevine, and Zen, being small, new, and still in beta, doesn’t have it. If you’re on Windows or macOS, which is most people, you can’t watch Netflix in Zen.
For a browser you’d want to use as your daily driver, the lack of DRM support can be a dealbreaker for a lot of people, and no amount of Glance view or Essentials makes up for it. The workaround is to keep a second browser around for streaming, not ideal, but manageable.
A beta browser that feels like a daily driver
Zen Browser isn’t trying to be Firefox with fancy skin on top. It’s what I think Firefox could have become if Mozilla had pushed harder on the features people actually want, such as workspaces, split view, and a sidebar that gets out of your way. The project has delivered on that, and it’s done it while staying open-source and community-driven.
The DRM gap is real, and I still keep Chrome around for streaming. But for everything else, Zen is where I work now. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to leave Chrome that isn’t just about privacy, this might be it.