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Zen Browser review and benchmark vs Chrome, Brave, Firefox and Safari

by Alex Yumashev · Updated Jan 31 2025

I'm looking for a new daily driver browser on my Mac. Chrome is a non-starter for me due to privacy concerns (Google's tracking empire is alive and well), and Edge is just... too much. Every update shoves another set of “features” down my throat — Copilot, discount coupons, Bing nonsense — things I have to disable again and again. No thanks.

I currently use Brave and I really want to like it, but something about it doesn't sit right with me. The constant crypto integration, some of the decisions around their search engine — it just feels like it's got an agenda. Arc? Well, Arc is dying now, so that's out.

Someone suggested Zen, which is a Firefox-based browser aiming to be an Arc-like alternative. That got me curious.

And since I already had all these browsers installed, I figured: why not run some benchmarks and see how they stack up?

Benchmark Setup

All tests were run using Speedometer 3.0 on a MacBook M3 Pro. I tested in incognito/private mode with (almost) no extensions:

Results

A few takeaways:

Now here's RAM usage after 3 hours of "normal" browsing: watching Youtube, chatting in Slack, reading Gmail, 8-9 tabs overall, with all extensions enabled:

UPDATE: after publishing this post I realized that I measure RAM usage entirely wrong. Chromium-based browsers always launch a ton of processes (one browser, 16 "renderers", 5 "helpers" and a GPU process) and carefully I summed them all up. However for Zen and Firefox I only counted the main "Zen/Firefox" process, while turns out these browsers also spawn a dozen processes like "Isolated WebContent", "Utility process", "WebExtensions" - which almost double the memory load. I'll update the screenshot after another run. If you're seeing this note - ignore the chart above!

A (tiny) Zen review

Zen is a very, very nice browser, but it has some rough edges:

P.S. 1Password Is a Performance Killer

One of the most surprising findings was how much 1Password's extension destroys Speedometer scores. Across all browsers, enabling it dropped my score by 10 points. No clue what it's doing under the hood, but it's heavy. Probably scans all inputs to shove a password into.