BrainBlog for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg
If you’re old like me, you remember the browser wars of the late 1990s.
A quick recap: Netscape Navigator achieved early market dominance, peaking at over 90% market share by the mid-1990s.
Microsoft saw the burgeoning importance of browsers to the global rise of the web and decided to enter – and dominate – the market with its Internet Explorer browser.
Microsoft’s strategy was to ‘embrace and extend’: embrace early standards like HTML and JavaScript while extending them to support the vendor-specific requirements of its software strategy.
Cut to 2025, and we can still hear echoes of the browser wars, only now between Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
While both browsers support now-mature HTML and JavaScript standards, the respective vendors battle over the broader ecosystem each one promotes.
Users must navigate Chrome extensions, analytics tools, and translation services from Google and the various moving parts of the dominant Microsoft 365 suite from our friends in Redmond.
Both browsers, therefore, are vendor-centric, supporting their respective owners’ strategies over the needs of users – who after all, get to use the software for free.
What the market is missing is an enterprise-centric browser – one that is free from the corporate priorities of large vendors, instead delivering the security, compliance, privacy, and control that companies – not the vendors – need.
The good news: Ulaa Enterprise from Zoho is precisely the browser that companies of all sizes – from enterprise to small business – require.
How to Build a Browser from Scratch
How did Zoho come up with Ulaa? After all, the prospect of building a new browser in today’s crowded market was daunting – but the brilliant minds at Zoho had a winning strategy.
First came the free version of Ulaa, a Chromium-based browser that supported all the JavaScript and HTML functionality today’s users expect from browsers. Naturally, Ulaa ran on all desktop and mobile platforms.
To this foundation, Zoho added rigorous privacy protections, in line with the company’s long-standing policies on privacy. These protections established Ulaa as a popular niche browser for users especially concerned about privacy.
As Zoho customers trust it with sensitive financial and customer information, privacy has always been a priority for the company. It leveraged this emphasis to differentiate Ulaa from its competitors.
From Ulaa to Ulaa Enterprise
The free version of Ulaa, however, was essentially a steppingstone to Ulaa Enterprise.
Building on Ulaa’s privacy protections, Zoho intentionally engineered Ulaa Enterprise to meet the needs of businesses in ways that the leading browsers did not.
It features no Google dependencies like geolocation and translation, instead leveraging Zoho’s own technology for these services.
Ulaa also doesn’t send data to Google, Microsoft, or anywhere else – extending the browser’s privacy protections to corporate users. Instead, Ulaa integrates with the full suite of Zoho apps and services, including its Zia AI agent and Zoho Vault password manager.
Ulaa Enterprise also supports rigorous security measures that enterprises would otherwise have to purchase separately.
It protects against phishing attacks, malicious websites, and other attempts at data exfiltration with built-in data leak prevention (DLP) capabilities.
Ulaa Enterprise can even prevent unauthorized tracking of users’ locations by controlling site access to location and sensor data and even comes with a built-in ad blocker.
Supporting IT Requirements with Administration Capabilities
Ulaa Enterprise also supports IT administrators with a range of policy-based controls.
Zoho offers a single central hub for administrators, giving them 360-degree insight and control over all browser activities in their organizations.
This central dashboard enables admins to track active and inactive devices, spot anomalous usage patterns, identify outdated instances, push updates, and detect non-compliant devices. Admins are thus able to enforce security measures in real time as potential threats emerge.
For organizations that require stringent DLP measures, Ulaa Enterprise gives admins even more powerful controls: download control, clipboard locking, screen capture locking, and watermarking of printed documents.
It’s also possible for admins to establish site restrictions, allowing or blocking websites as per corporate policies. Admins are even able to manage browser extensions, bookmarks, media controls, and cookies across the organization.
Modes for Every Persona
Such stringent admin controls are important – but aren’t necessary for every organization or for every individual within the organization.
For this reason, Zoho has equipped Ulaa Enterprise with a variety of modes that provide different levels of control for different people in different situations.
Zoho recognizes that while some organizations restrict the use of work computers to work environments, other companies allow employees to bring their laptops home.
As a result, modes include personal, work, kids, developers, and perhaps the most interesting: ‘open season,’ for situations where the user wants to live dangerously and turn off all the protections.
Ulaa Enterprise thus offers all the controls that even the most restrictive organizations require, combined with the flexibility necessary to meet the needs of companies of all sizes and industries.
The Intellyx Take
When I first heard that Zoho was launching the free version of Ulaa, I scratched my head. Does the world really need another browser? Why would Zoho invest considerable resources into a free product that was unlikely to gain significant market share?
Zoho Enterprise answers those questions, as it fills a significant need in the marketplace. There are other enterprise browsers out there, but they are either overly restrictive or consist of a mishmash of different tools with a correspondingly high administrative overhead.
Ulaa Enterprise, in contrast, is both powerful and simple. It offers the most stringent controls while also providing flexibility for organizations to configure it with the level of control they require. And at a buck a month per device (or $10 per year), how can you go wrong?
Copyright © Intellyx BV. Zoho is an Intellyx customer, and Microsoft is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article.
