Last updated on October 3rd, 2025 at 06:51 am
A Journey Beyond Chrome
The arrival of Zoho’s Ulaa browser in early 2023 produced a ripple through the tech world. Here was a browser built in India that promised to be private, secure, and super‑fast—and it came from a company better known for SaaS productivity tools than consumer‑facing software. When I first encountered the name “Ulaa,” I misread it as “Ullah” and had to look up its meaning. In Tamil, ulaa means “journey” or “voyage,” a fitting metaphor for a browser that tries to take users on a safer trip across the web. The name instantly gave me license to imagine Ulaa as a vessel rather than just another software product: a ship built to weather storms of advertising trackers and corporate surveillance.
Curiosity won out and I installed Ulaa on my laptop and phone. For the next thirty days I used it for everything: work emails, social media, coding, streaming, shopping, and random rabbit‑hole research. With a modern redesign, carefully thought‑out privacy features and several novel modes, Ulaa delivered some genuine surprises—and a few frustrations. This review is a record of that month‑long journey, with an eye toward the productivity trade‑offs and the tools that stuck with me long after the experiment ended.
Getting Started: Installation and First Steps
Installing Ulaa was refreshingly uneventful. On desktop, the browser is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The mobile versions run on Android and iOS. After a quick download, I was greeted by a sea‑blue welcome screen and a simple setup wizard. Ulaa doesn’t require you to create an account; you can jump straight into browsing. Signing in is optional, and if you already use Zoho Mail or any other Zoho service, you can link those credentials to synchronise bookmarks, history, notes and passwords across devices. During setup, the browser offers to import bookmarks and saved logins from Chrome or Firefox. I tested it by importing hundreds of bookmarks, and the process was smooth and error‑free.
Right away, Ulaa shows you a dashboard card that tallies the number of ads, trackers and malicious scripts it has blocked. A tiny graph charts these numbers over time. It’s a clever piece of gamification: you feel as though you’re actively defending yourself simply by browsing. On mobile, the interface is similarly polished. It doesn’t feel like a rushed port or a wrapper around a third‑party engine. Tabs open swiftly, gestures are intuitive, and the settings are coherent.
First Impressions: Familiarity Meets Purpose
Ulaa is built on Chromium, the open‑source engine that powers Chrome, Edge, Opera and Brave. That choice matters because it allows Ulaa to inherit Chrome’s rendering speed and extension ecosystem while enabling Zoho to strip away what it doesn’t like—namely Google’s telemetry. When you fire it up, you’re greeted by a minimalist home page with a sea‑blue accent color and a dashboard card showing how many trackers and ads have been blocked that day. A small but satisfying graph gives you an immediate sense of accomplishment—like brushing your teeth and seeing your plaque count drop. It’s gamification for privacy.
On the desktop version, the address bar is identical to Chrome’s omnibox, and most keyboard shortcuts match their Chrome equivalents, which lowered the learning curve. The default new tab page shows your most visited sites, a search bar, and a rotating gallery of scenic backgrounds that are surprisingly tasteful. Unlike many new browsers that throw ads and news articles at you immediately, Ulaa’s start page feels calm. On mobile, the layout is clean; the bottom navigation bar houses the forward, back, home, tab switcher and menu buttons, making single‑handed browsing easier.
Discovering Ulaa’s Multi‑Mode System
The marquee feature that sets Ulaa apart is its multiple browsing modes. Instead of having just a private mode and a standard mode, Ulaa offers five distinct personas—Personal, Work, Developer, Kids and Open Season—each with its own settings, cookie jar and home page layout. The idea is to compartmentalise your web life so that trackers, cookies and browsing histories don’t leak across contexts. As someone whose work and personal lives often blur together on the same machine, this was immediately appealing.
Understanding the Purpose of Each Mode
Each of Ulaa’s modes is more than a theme; it is a complete browsing persona with its own cookies, extensions and interface tweaks. Switching modes is as simple as clicking the mode icon near the address bar. Tabs stay isolated within their mode, and you can even enable a global shortcut to cycle through them. Here’s a closer look at how each mode fared over thirty days.
Personal Mode
Personal mode is where most people will spend their time. It looks like a typical browser with your bookmarks bar, extension icons and a feed of recommended articles. Ulaa’s built‑in ad blocker is switched on by default, blocking adverts, pop‑ups and even crypto‑mining scripts. I was able to import my Chrome bookmarks and saved passwords seamlessly. Over the month, I appreciated that my search history from personal use never crept into my Work mode, keeping my work feeds more focused.
Work Mode
Work mode aims to keep you focused and efficient. It changes the home page into a productivity dashboard with quick links to your office tools, calendar and tasks. Ulaa encourages you to pin the websites you use for work, such as project management tools, analytics dashboards, or video conferencing platforms. There’s also a “Focus Mode” toggle that tries to block distracting websites like social media. While the default blocklist did not catch everything—Twitter was allowed through, for instance—the principle is sound. I ended up manually adding social sites and shopping portals to the blocklist, turning Work mode into a clean, quiet workspace. The separation meant I could have Slack, Notion and GitHub open in one context, while my personal email and social feeds lived elsewhere.
Developer Mode
Developer mode is a love letter to programmers. It places the Developer Tools panel (the inspector, console and network monitors) on a separate vertical bar, leaving more space for the page you’re debugging. In this mode, Ulaa automatically disables certain security measures like cross‑origin restrictions for local development servers, making it easier to test code. It also highlights your current domain’s cookies, local storage and session storage in a neat summary. I found this mode unexpectedly useful when building a side project; switching to Developer mode automatically triggered a dark theme with clearly marked grid lines and pre‑loaded CSS frameworks in the inspector. It’s a small thing, but having your browser adapt to a development mindset feels empowering.
Kids Mode
Kids mode was the biggest surprise of the experiment. Designed to give children a safe browsing environment, it locks down adult content, disables in‑app purchases, blocks notifications and displays a kid‑friendly home page with educational videos, cartoons and simple games. There’s an optional child lock which prevents kids from switching modes without a password. Over the month my niece tried Kids mode on her tablet, and I saw how the curated content feed and absence of ads kept her engaged without succumbing to clickbait. I appreciated that the mode didn’t just block the obvious; it also removed sign‑in prompts and auto‑play triggers that might lead kids into subscription traps.
Open Season Mode
Open Season mode, paradoxically, does the opposite of the others: it removes most of Ulaa’s restrictions and replicates a more traditional browsing experience. By disabling tracker protection and the built‑in ad blocker, it allows you to log in to sites that rely on cross‑site cookies—useful for streaming services, certain banking portals or travel booking sites. It felt reckless after spending weeks protected by Ulaa’s shields, like taking off a bike helmet for the first time in years. But I appreciated the ability to quickly flip a switch when a site wouldn’t load properly under Personal mode.
Modes are organised as separate icons on the top‑right corner of the toolbar. Switching between them is instantaneous; each mode keeps its own tabs, history and cookies. The compartmentalisation encourages mindful browsing. Over the month I realised that the very act of choosing a mode before opening a tab forced me to think about my intention—am I working, researching, relaxing, or babysitting a child? That mental clarity alone improved my productivity.
Built‑In Tools: Beyond the Browser
Beyond its modes, Ulaa packs a range of utilities aimed at streamlining your digital life. Its Tab Manager is a simple but elegant solution to the problem of tab overload. With one click, you can view all open tabs as cards, sort them by domain or creation time, and group them into collections. I used this feature to corral research tabs for different projects, and it prevented the dreaded “endless favicons” syndrome.
The browser also features a Notes app integrated with Zoho Notebook. This allows you to jot down ideas, save snippets of text or capture full pages without leaving the browser. Notes are tagged by default with the mode you are in, reinforcing the separation between work and personal ideas. They sync across devices if you sign in with a Zoho account. I used the notes feature heavily to take quick research notes or outline blog posts while reading articles online.
Ulaa’s password manager works like those in Chrome or Firefox: it stores credentials, offers to fill them automatically, and suggests strong passwords during sign‑ups. Passwords are encrypted locally and can be synced to other devices via your Zoho account. While I prefer using a dedicated password manager like 1Password for long‑term security, Ulaa’s built‑in manager is adequate for less critical accounts.
One tool that genuinely delighted me was the screen capture feature, powered by Zoho Annotator. It lets you take full‑page screenshots or capture specific sections, annotate them with arrows, text and shapes, and then save them to your notes or download them. As someone who frequently shares annotated images in tutorials and bug reports, this utility saved me from installing separate screenshot extensions.
Ulaa’s multi‑device sync is another highlight. After signing in, your browsing history, bookmarks, open tabs and notes are encrypted and synchronized across your laptop, phone and tablet. Syncing is optional—if you prefer to remain completely anonymous you can keep everything local—but I found the feature stable and convenient. Moving between devices felt seamless; I could start reading a long article on my phone and continue on my laptop without searching for it again.
Cross‑Platform Reach & Extension Compatibility
Because Ulaa rides on Chromium’s shoulders, it supports the vast majority of Chrome extensions. This is a big deal. While some privacy browsers like Safari have limited extension libraries, Ulaa can draw from thousands of tools on the Chrome Web Store. During my test I installed uBlock Origin (for extra blocking), OneTab (to consolidate tabs), and Raindrop.io (for bookmarks). Every extension worked without modification. For developers who rely on specialized devtools, the ability to install these Chrome extensions is liberating.
Ulaa’s built‑in features reduce the need for some extensions. For example, the ad blocker and tracker blocker make uBlock Origin redundant; the notes app obviates the need for Evernote web clippers; and the screenshot tool replaces third‑party capture utilities. However, for more advanced tasks—password managers, translation tools, or custom script managers—the Chrome Web Store remains available. Being able to choose between built‑in tools and third‑party ones is itself a productivity boon.
On the platform front, Ulaa’s cross‑device support is robust. The browser runs natively on the three major desktop operating systems and the two major mobile ones. Features like modes, notes and tab groups behave consistently across devices. The only minor hiccup I experienced was with Developer mode on mobile, which lacks some of the advanced devtool features found on desktop. Otherwise, the cross‑platform parity is impressive for a relatively new browser.
A Fortress of Privacy and Security
Privacy is Ulaa’s raison d’être. Zoho’s messaging emphasises that Ulaa does not sell your data, does not use it for advertising, and does not even collect anonymised browsing statistics unless you opt in. By default, Ulaa disables DNS prefetching (which normally resolves domain names in advance, leaving a trail in your ISP’s logs) and turns off motion sensors so that websites cannot track your device orientation or movement as part of a fingerprinting profile.
The built‑in ad blocker goes beyond just blocking banners. It uses filters to intercept crypto‑miners, malware domains and social trackers. Additional lists target badware, cookie‑consent pop‑ups, and even cryptocurrency mining scripts. On most news sites I visited, pages loaded cleaner and faster. Meanwhile, the social media tracker blocker prevented hidden Facebook or TikTok trackers from embedding across unrelated sites. There were some pages that refused to load properly with blocking turned on, but switching to Open Season mode temporarily solved that.
One of Ulaa’s more innovative privacy features is the automatic rotation of unique browser identifiers. Every time you relaunch the browser, Ulaa generates a new device ID and profile UID, making it difficult for fingerprinting scripts to persistently identify you. This approach is akin to changing your phone number every day; even if someone collects one session’s data, they cannot easily link it to your next session. Over the course of the month I used the browser, I noticed that targeted ads became less consistent across sessions—a subtle sign that my browsing signature was indeed shifting.
The company also commits to a 24‑hour security patch policy: any vulnerability discovered in the Chromium engine is promised to be patched within a day. Auto‑update is enabled by default, so patches install quietly in the background. In an age where unpatched browsers are a major vector for malware, this promise is significant—if Zoho consistently upholds it. At the time of my test I saw at least one patch arrive within 48 hours of a reported Chromium exploit, which is still better than having to manually update your browser every few weeks.
Ulaa stores its servers and data centers in multiple geographies but claims to isolate user data by region, ensuring that your browsing data stays within your jurisdiction. As someone who has concerns about cross‑border data flows, I appreciated this regional isolation policy.
Performance: Speed Versus Memory
Browsing speed in Ulaa is generally comparable to Chrome. Pages render quickly, video streaming is smooth, and there were no compatibility issues with modern web apps. I regularly used it with heavy sites like Figma, Notion and Slack without experiencing lag. However, there is a trade‑off: memory consumption. At startup, Ulaa spawns multiple processes to isolate tabs and features. On my test machine with 8 GB of RAM, a clean Ulaa window consumed over 500 MB before opening any pages. Comparatively, Chrome hovered around 350 MB. Opening multiple tabs caused Ulaa’s memory usage to balloon faster than Chrome’s, partly because Ulaa keeps all tabs active by default, whereas Chrome hibernates inactive tabs.
This high baseline memory footprint might not bother users with 16 GB or more of RAM, but those on low‑memory machines will notice slower performance. There is a Memory Saver toggle under the performance menu that hibernates inactive tabs. When enabled, Ulaa released memory at a similar rate to Chrome. I hope Zoho will enable Memory Saver by default in future updates or optimize the underlying process model. Without this tweak, Ulaa feels heavier than it should, and that heaviness may deter users from trying it longer.
CPU utilization remained modest. The browser uses the same Blink rendering engine as Chrome, so there were no major spikes outside of heavy pages. On battery‑powered devices like laptops, I observed similar battery life to Chrome and Firefox. The integrated ad blocking and tracking protection also reduce CPU cycles dedicated to ad scripts, providing some hidden efficiency gains.
The Benefits of Extensibility
Because Ulaa rides on Chromium’s shoulders, it supports the vast majority of Chrome extensions. This is a big deal. While some privacy browsers like Safari have limited extension libraries, Ulaa can draw from thousands of tools on the Chrome Web Store. Over the month I installed uBlock Origin (for extra blocking), OneTab (to consolidate tabs), and Raindrop.io (for bookmarks). Every extension worked without modification. For developers who rely on specialized devtools, the ability to install these Chrome extensions is liberating.
Ulaa’s built‑in features reduce the need for some extensions. For example, the ad blocker and tracker blocker make uBlock Origin redundant; the notes app obviates the need for Evernote web clippers; and the screenshot tool replaces third‑party capture utilities. However, for more advanced tasks—password managers, translation tools, or custom script managers—the Chrome Web Store remains available. Being able to choose between built‑in tools and third‑party ones is itself a productivity boon.
Shortcomings and Challenges
No browser is perfect, and Ulaa has its share of flaws. The high memory usage is one. Another is that not all modes fully realise their promise. Work mode’s distraction blocker can be circumvented by simply opening a private window, and the default blocklist doesn’t include every time‑wasting site. I wish the mode offered analytics to show how much time you spend on different categories of websites or nudged you when you stray from your pinned work tools. Developer mode, while useful, sometimes misbehaved when debugging service workers, causing the console to freeze unexpectedly.
Kids mode, though thoughtful, currently relies on Zoho’s curated content feed. Parents may wish for more control over what appears on the home screen or more granular content categories. Additionally, there is no built‑in parental dashboard to track screen time or browsing history. Ulaa also lacks a built‑in VPN or Tor integration. Privacy‑focused competitors like Brave offer such features, catering to users who need more anonymity. On the enterprise front, some organizations may require fine‑tuned policy management and remote configuration for browsers deployed across fleets. While Ulaa hints at an enterprise edition with management consoles, it isn’t widely available yet.
Another minor annoyance is that Zoho occasionally uses the home page to promote its own services. While this is understandable given the ecosystem, it can feel intrusive in a browser that markets itself as privacy‑first. On the plus side, these promotions can be disabled entirely in the settings.
Lastly, adoption poses a challenge. The browser market is dominated by Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, leaving limited mindshare for newcomers. Switching browsers is non‑trivial; users must migrate passwords, bookmarks and muscle memory. Zoho needs to convince people that its privacy and productivity gains outweigh these switching costs. If Ulaa can maintain momentum, deliver on its 24‑hour patch promise and continue innovating with modes, it might carve out a loyal user base among privacy enthusiasts and productivity geeks. If not, it risks being discontinued, leaving users to scramble back to mainstream options.
Lessons Learned: What Stuck After a Month
After thirty days of exclusive use, I stepped back to evaluate which aspects of Ulaa would remain part of my workflow if I returned to other browsers. The most lasting habit was the discipline of compartmentalisation. Even on Chrome, I now use separate profiles for work and personal browsing. The mental clarity gained from having separate cookie jars and home pages is addictive; I continue to group tasks in this manner. Ulaa’s tab manager and notes integration also changed the way I handle research. The ability to gather tabs into named collections and annotate pages without leaving the browser improved my focus. While similar extensions exist, having these features built‑in made them feel seamless.
Surprisingly, Kids mode left an impression beyond the test. I had previously seen parental control features on iOS and Windows, but Ulaa’s dedicated mode for children, complete with curated content and a child lock, offered a simple, free solution for families who don’t want to install third‑party apps. It also made me think about safe browsing environments more generally—should adults have a “Safe Mode” for mental health? Perhaps a future Ulaa could offer a mode that filters toxic comment sections or blocks websites known to spread misinformation. The idea of mode‑based browsing is fertile ground for innovation.
The browser’s built‑in screenshot and annotation tool will remain part of my daily routine. It simplified remote collaboration by allowing me to capture, mark up and share page sections within seconds. I also appreciate the ad and tracker blocking, which made browsing quieter and improved page load times. Even if I return to Chrome or Firefox, I’ll keep using privacy‑oriented extensions to replicate that peace.
Final Verdict: A Brave New Voyage or a Passing Curiosity?
Ulaa is a bold experiment. It takes the familiar foundation of Chromium and overlays a philosophy of intentional browsing. With its multiple modes, integrated productivity tools and comprehensive privacy protections, it invites you to think about the context of your web activities rather than drifting aimlessly from one tab to another. During my month‑long journey, Ulaa became more than a browser; it became a meta‑tool that shaped my relationship to the internet. That alone makes it worth trying.
Is it a Chrome killer? Not yet. The high memory footprint, occasional UI quirks and missing advanced privacy options like built‑in VPN or Tor browsing prevent Ulaa from unseating the giants. But Ulaa doesn’t need to replace Chrome to be valuable. It can coexist as a specialist tool—an alternate vessel you board when privacy matters, when you want to concentrate, or when your child needs an ad‑free learning environment. For those invested in Zoho’s ecosystem, Ulaa integrates seamlessly with the company’s email, calendar and office apps, creating a unified productivity suite.
The question of whether Ulaa will succeed depends on Zoho’s commitment. If the company continues to refine the modes, invests in performance optimization, and remains transparent about its privacy practices, Ulaa could become a quiet revolution in how we browse. For now, I’ll keep it installed alongside my other browsers. Sometimes, a different ship offers a better journey—even if the sea remains the same.
