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?
All tests were run using Speedometer 3.0 on a MacBook M3 Pro. I tested in incognito/private mode with (almost) no extensions:
Chrome: Running uBlock Origin
Brave: Default built-in ad/privacy blocker enabled
Safari: Clean
Firefox: Clean
Zen: Clean
Chrome 132.0.6834.160 - 37.7
Brave 1.74.51 - 37.6
Safari 18.2 - 37.6
Firefox 134.0.2 - 34.8
Zen Browser 1.7.3b - 31.6
A few takeaways:
Chrome is (unsurprisingly) the fastest. Even though I forgot to remove the UBO extension in incognito.
Brave is essentially Chrome with a privacy skin, Leo AI, some Crypto stuff etc, and the Speedometer score reflects that.
Safari holds up impressively well, matching Brave's performance while being more native to macOS (and using less battery). I wish it had proper vertical tabs.
Firefox holds up well but is still behind Chromium-based browsers. Not awful, but not amazing either.
Zen, being Firefox-based, lags a bit further behind. If you want a Firefox alternative that looks different but runs about the same, it's an option. Otherwise, it's just Firefox with extra UI features (see below).
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!
Zen is a very, very nice browser, but it has some rough edges:
Cmd+W
should close a window when no tabs are left. There's a hidden setting browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab
to fix this, but seriously, just follow macOS conventions by default. Took me a while to find.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.