A Better Browser Balance Between Fast and Secure

Let’s consider the average workday for our teams. It's often browser-based – toggling between tabs to access apps and get the information they need. It's a testament to how integral the browser has become to modern productivity.

But as we increasingly rely on the browser for our daily work, we're keenly aware that without the right protections, it can become a significant attack surface. It's no secret that sophisticated phishing attacks, evasive malware, and a constantly evolving threat landscape mean that every single web interaction carries a potential risk.

Enterprise security in any browser

As a reminder, Zscaler Zero Trust Browser delivers enterprise-grade security to any browser, providing robust threat protection, data security, and seamless app access for employees and third-party users on managed or unmanaged devices. Fully integrated with Zscaler, it streamlines secure access by removing VDI complexity, VPN risk, and the need for additional browsers. Specifically, the Zero Trust Browser executes web content in an isolated cloud to air-gap users from threats, delivering robust web protections. 

A perceived tradeoff

Let’s get to the heart of the matter: the security industry has long grappled with a perceived trade-off between robust protection that evolving threats demand and fast, native-like experiences. Isolated browsers, despite offering significant security benefits, have faced challenges in achieving broader adoption. This is largely because they often provided a slower user experience that what employees were used to.

Turbocharged experiences

Zscaler has long focused on striking a great balance, proving that strong security doesn’t have to sacrifice performance. But fast is never fast enough, so to continuously elevate this experience and stay ahead of evolving web demands, we developed Turbo Mode. Zscaler fundamentally re-architected how isolated sessions were delivered. In fact, to deliver Turbo Mode, we borrowed a concept from online gaming in order to deliver near-native responses with high graphic output. It worked well for gaming, so we have extended this to rendering web pages in isolation.

 Turbo Mode strategically splits the rendering workload, leveraging the power of GLSL instructions, to reduce the need to stream bandwidth-intensive graphics, and offloading that to the user's local device GPU. The impact is immediate and enabling: lightning-fast page loads, seamless streaming of video, and highly responsive web applications. Users experience a truly "native-like" browsing feel, often completely unaware that their session is being executed within an isolated, threat-free environment.

Trusting the URL

It is not lost on us that another critical area of focus is user familiarity and trust. We've long understood that while our Zero Trust Browser provides formidable protection by isolating web threats, the display of a Zscaler-specific URL in the browser bar could seem unfamiliar to users accustomed to seeing the original website's address.

With this in mind, our approach provides administrators with a powerful capability: the option to precisely control how URLs are displayed. Organizations have the flexibility to:

• Display the original URL: Enhancing user familiarity and trust, making the secure browsing experience feels even more intuitive for content opened in isolated sessions.
• Display the Zscaler URL: This reinforces that Zscaler's protection is actively safeguarding the session, subtly educating users about the security layers in place, especially for sites that might carry more inherent risk.

With this, we help boost user confidence with a more intuitive browsing experience, reduce helpdesk queries related to unfamiliar URLs, and encourage more collaboration with URLs that users feel confident in bookmarking and sharing. 

By offering this intelligent transparency, Zscaler continues to demonstrate our ongoing evolution in providing not just industry-leading security, but also a progressively more intuitive and empowering user experience.  

Modern work runs in the browser, so protections in the browser must be powerful without slowing people down. That’s the balance set out at the start, and it’s exactly what capabilities like Turbo Mode and Original URL deliver—native-like performance and familiar experiences with enterprise-grade security—raising the bar for secure productivity.

Are you interested in seeing the product in action? Please talk to your account team or request a demo here.