A farewell to Arc browser
arc.net
arc.net
They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...
I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.
Firefox is "copying" from Zen, and I think that's good. I do like Zen, but I wouldn't mind having all the features in Firefox (and imho some of the UI lately in Zen is... weird)
For my personal usage I find the deep nesting of TST to get in the way more than it helps and so the simpler model of Arc/Zen where nesting only happens intentionally is nice.
> even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.
Hmm what's Sidebery missing?
> Hmm what's Sidebery missing?
The extensions themselves aren't lacking, but they suffer from being extensions and not part of the browser proper, which makes for occasional weird interactions and glitches and the "seams" between extension and host becoming tangible from time to time. Things just work better when the browser "knows" about the tabs being vertical and having deeper organization than is possible with horizontal tab bars, or is even designed around vertical tabs being the only option (like Arc/Zen).
You can add all the features, but you can't make them work well together (or look nice in some cases - which does matter!)
Sidebery can do the 80% of TST that matters, with a better UI and UX and saner defaults. Also it has a feature to save and restore all tabs, with the whole tree structure preserved (even though I think it should be its own extension)
Only problem is that I suspect that Sidebery has severe memory leaks (not entirely sure it's the culprit though)
Firefox has those features now, that's all that matters. Not sure I wanna trust a solo dev on my daily browser, however competent they are.
split panels, profile switcher, tab groups...
The 90% remaining are UI gimmicks that are irrelevant anyway (mods, custom cursor, free canvas?). Even when Arc was still alive they're useless which is why the browser died (it sucked at doing things that matter). Zen just picked up this lack of focus and make it worse with the solo maintainer situation.
- The distinction between pinned (soft-bookmarked) tabs and other tabs is very useful for me organizing things at work. (I didn't like when Arc added a setting to auto-delete other tabs X days after creating, though)
- Multiple "spaces" on the tab bar combined with global bookmarks at the top mean I can have a space for planning work and one for implementation work, and from both of those I have an easy link to Jira to search up tickets without needing to hop back and forth.
Being paid to not compete. That includes taking any sort of UI risk that would lead to evolution.
I’m pretty sure I saw more Arc videos posted after Dia than before. None of the people seemed to be aware that the browser they were pushing was effectively end of life.
Arc existed long before Dia, and had AI shoved into it when LLMs exploded, then the company decided to go all-in on an AI browser, Dia, and orphaned Arc...
Arc was an alternative web browser with novel UX and AI features built-in. The company was acquired for $610 million by Atlassian and development was halted in favorite of Dia, another browser with AI features and novel UX (which I also had to look up)
(Back when the headline was "Arc is Sunsetting". I am so 2 minutes ago.)
Dia now does appear now to have many of the Arc UX features. Plus AI.
Indeed, doesn’t look good at all.
Arc Development stopped (May 2025) - https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-browser-company-stops-active...
Acquisition (Sep 2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45126358
There is no AI in it so far as I can tell, and I'm using it right now to type this comment. It's a chromium skin really, of course, but it's great.
Anything else like Arc does too much. This is a true disappointment, coming from The Browser Company
As a bonus it's based on Firefox so uBlock Origin is available.
Something is super, super fucked up with valuation of companies and the profiteering of late stage capitalism for stuff like that to be able to happen.
No wonder lots of people are saying the world feels worse than ever, everything's expensive and it seems in many ways we've regressed rather than "made things better for our children".
The closest thing right now is Orion. It does the vertical tabs and the page modification in the same way. Webkit based.
It's made by the Kagi guys who I really agree with - bootstrapped and not VC backed. A sustainable business. And charging for a service instead of making your customers the product. That's real ethics to me.
Their browser is not open source, though, which is a major blow. But it would seem most browsers are not truly now, if you look into it.
The reason I switched was because it is the only browser that, on iOS, allows chrome/firefox plugins. I'm not even sure how they're doing this as I thought banning non-crippled plugins was part of the 'device is not mine' policy from Apple. But it's there. All my plugins. Including the ones I made myself.
I realize this sounds like an Ad. Not affiliated. I just think they're doing good stuff.
Obviously they can't control extensions, but if popular extensions break your browser, and you don't offer a good native replacement, it's a bit of a no-go.
This was a year or so ago, so maybe it's better now.
Last time I checked Orion was the only decent solution with at least some ad block capabilities.
Bacause I don’t want to be pushed towards a $100 per month plan where the «key feature» is an AI morning brief.
You can get Claude Pro for $20/month and if you hook it into a browser, I'm not sure what you'd be missing out on from those listed perks.
I mean I get the benefit of a prepackaged experience but not at 5x the cost.
/EDIT: I looked into this by... well, asking Dia:
> That fits what I described. You aren't on a plan because you haven't had to pick one yet. People who were using Dia before paid plans launched on August 17 kept the AI features for free, with nothing to choose and no card on file. Dia says it will email those users at least 30 days before that changes.
>
> So nothing's wrong. It just isn't permanently free either. It's free for now because you joined early. When the notice email comes, you'll have about a month to decide:
So I'm grandfathered "for now", but the Daily brief and AI features are so low value to me, I just assumed they're free for everyone because of how little they do. I never use the built-in AI in Dia and get annoyed when a query that I wanted to go to a search engine gets answered by the assistant instead.
It's picked up all the most important parts of Arc's design while leaving behind the bits that were questionable (such as TBC's decision to not have bookmarks) and at this point it's pretty solid.
I had been continuing to use Arc for the odd site that insists on something Chromium-based (usually without good reason) since it's the only chromeclone that feels somewhat at home on macOS and hasn't succumb to an ugly generic flat look. It'll be missed.
For a while Arc was my main, but I switched to Orion when it was announced that Arc was going on maintenance mode. Since then I've waffled between Orion and Safari.
The only reason I can figure out is that they decided the technical foundations were just wrong, which would be surprising because they put an astonishing amount of work into building some very specific technical foundations for Arc.
Now that Chrome has native vertical tabs I'm back on Chrome, but I do miss Arc's tab tidying and organisation.
Dia has sidebar tabs now, but it feels half baked, and the AI Chat button is an annoyingly permanent ads.
Nook was interesting for 30sec, but you will soon find out it's just not done.
RIP Arc, there's no match, I'll miss you.
1 - https://supasidebar.com 2 - https://loshadki.app/openin4/
I’m still pulling for Atlassian to do Interesting Things with the app. AI can be part of it but I think there’s a ton of opportunity for a browser for the enterprise / organizations and atlassian is well positioned to do that, AI or no. Things like: - shared company file Management accessible directly in app - cross saas–app workflows enabled at the browser level, managed centrally by the org — slack, zoom, screen sharing/recording and other collab tools natively baked into the app
So many people spend all their work day flipping between different apps and docs in the browser and there’s sooo much more we (as humanity) could do to improve that experience. The browser is a natural site for it and I hope someone gives it a shot.
Dia is a joke.
After a year to cool off, I gave Dia a shot. Despite wanting to hate it, I like the browser a lot. You can turn off the shit AI features, and it's a well designed and thoughtful UX.
As much as Josh is a tool, this is genuinely a great product and the team at TBC has executed really well.
did you really have to include that? without substantiation this is just a mean offhand side swipe.
They are trying to add Arc features into Dia, but its an afterthought. I used it for a month and came back, it was not a good experience.
I've been using Arc on my personal laptop and phone exclusively for a couple years now, and want a more informed reason to or not to invest in moving over to Dia.
But that's why I personally liked it, it was for a power user. Having multiple profiles, and a clean working environment, a lot of small but smart really thought out features. It felt like a actual revolutionary product.
In Dia there is a constant menu bar, for instance to make it easier for users. But it spoils the whole clean experience of Arc.
Dia seems to be just for mainstream, I can understand giving the focus to Dia, but removing Arc seems to be foolish. Especially when so many people are still using it.
Dia is focused more on AI tools, and seems to be more distracting for me, the focus seems to be to sell us a subscription, it feels quite different from the straightforward feature rich, power user browsers, which was Arc.
If you do, and you regularly tile windows, you know that vertical tabs are terrible because if you have 2 browser windows and tile them side-by-side, suddenly 40% of your screen is wasted showing tabs on 2 windows.
I really don't want to learn an entirely different set of multitasking shortcuts just for my browser. I know how to multitask with my browser already, the same way I multitask with everything else, and none of the solutions seem more convenient.
Most browsers try to port the vertical tabs or the split view and proudly say "look, we did it, you can now switch from Arc" but none get this tab concept right, except for Zen which regrettably uses Firefox/Gecko as its base.
Don't you love it when your browser has a remote kill switch ?
The main features I miss from Arc are Peek, Air Traffic Control, and Nested Folders.
Posting from Ladybird BTW (compiled from git today), which is starting to take shape!
Even the login screen asked for “your work email”…
Letter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709
i really liked tidy, clear, capture screenshots and other shortcuts. it felt a complete browser. maybe dia will eventually reach that stage - but its definitely not there.
Obviously more interesting if I'd thought to screenshot prior to going to bed but you can have multiple tabs in a 'stream' and they can be terminal or web tabs. The relay (which I'm pentesting in the screenshot) transports the AI chats to a paired phone where they're adapted to have a common UI across the Claude / Codex / Oh My Pi that I use. You can obviously see the Arc lineage to the ideas here.
If you want freedom, features and manifest v2 then just use and support Firefox.
Just another example of a cancerous VC-backed business.
E.g., when Microsoft Edge moved to Chromium.
This marketing strategy basically tells potential users that this company might shut down their browsers at any time and that it’s not worth investing in their ecosystem.
From my POV, it was mostly a product & design leadership failure. Ironic, because the team had phenomenal design and product work individually. They took a cheap way out with building a second browser, lost most of their userbase, and in doing so, admitted that users didn't want what they were building the way they were building it. It wasn't magical or intuitive, or else it would've been fine to build into Arc.
But instead of doing the hard overarching product & design work and making the tough calls, to build that roadmap step-by-step and add the magic, they decided they couldn't reconcile these two ideas into one, and needed two browsers.
One anecdote: Despite sharing mutual investors and connections with them, I never even heard back on any feature ideas or bug reports sent to the founder.
The auto-hiding sidebar, the pins, the smart folders, split tabs, command bar…
I will miss you Arc! Now to find a new browser ;(
Arc Browser, for me, is the browser done right. It has all the UX details make browsing productive and satisfying. It is just very sad the browser company does not open source it.
At least at the last time I check, Zen still does not have all those subtleties.
I beleive there will be people build better UI for the coming ladybird browser, and please borrow from Arc.
They’re likely making this decision because no one’s using their AI, something Arc makes totally optional and invisible, and obviously that’s a big problem
Arc was never made for you and me. It was made for VCs to make a bunch of money exponentially, and because they failed, you get your workflow remotely deleted
I am no longer an early adopter for browsers. Firefox is just so darn good now (and I'm so used to it) that I don't feel a desire to try other stuff.
Hopefully it might get open sourced.
Nobody but me has it and it is great!
It has all the arc features except for the AI ones. It has nested tabs: when you open a tab from a tab it nests it underneath its parent. Infinitely.
I added right click menu items such as copying the urls of multiple selected tabs in one go, copying the urls of downloads, multi-part downloads. I am thinking of making downloading media from visited pages a first class citizen.
I’ve also optimised the memory usage for people like me with hundreds of tabs.
It has ad-blocking and fingerprint evasion built-in.
I am going to build in some markdown extraction features to quickly copy pages for my llms and maybe an mcp server for my local agent to read the web through. I’ll have to see though.
Having a browser work exactly how I want it is great. I have hotkeys that I need for things that weren’t possible for me before without hammerspoon.
I might release it at some point.
I might look into being able to build it on a server at some point, but it works for me.
The zen of this position is severely underrated.
Lmao even
Encapsulates enshittification in the current era really well, actually.
The lasting memory of these guys is how they refused to listen to their users. It was insane from the beginning how little they cared what their niche demographic even wanted. It got so bad so fast that after trying to get an invite and waiting a few months by the time I got invited it was already clearly a shit show and I didn’t even bother trialling it. The WeWork of browsers.
Dumb. Browsers, Cars, TVs, should not require accounts.
Won't be missed.
There are almost no startups today that can survive if VC funding did not exist, even more so now that AI and LLMs exists.
Might as well not use any of them if they are funded by VCs or angel investors.
And if not, how should they be funded?
Donations? Not sustainable.
Not sustainable for anyone wanting to charge for software.
Unless of course you're Stripe (which is VC funded) we still need an OSS version of Stripe.
Source: In his May 2025 open letter to Arc members and subsequent public statements, CEO Josh Miller reassured users that while active feature development was ending, Arc would be maintained indefinitely.
https://www.theverge.com/news/674603/arc-browser-development...
It's another example of how euphemisms are poison. "Indefinitely" has come to mean infinitely, because of people using it to mean infinitely. The first step to fraud is to come up with a euphemism for what you're doing, and on of the the smartest things to do is make that euphemism an already existing word that already meant something different.
Even better if that euphemism meant something more general that includes your meaning but isn't limited to your meaning. Or if it meant something totally different, but you want to eventually substitute your meaning with its original meaning within current laws or norms (see shoving the word "Open" or "Free" into software that are not associated with Open Source or Free Software.)
The law should be dealing with this, but Western governments have abandoned governance for patron-serving. If somebody says "indefinitely" when it comes to a product or service, and people are known to be confused by that term, they should simply be forced to clarify. Same for "own"/"buy", "unlimited," or any number of accepted lies that have become standard.
No court of law is going to accept an argument that indefinite == infinite, especially after it stops being indefinite (like TFA).
Remember when all a browser had to do was browse? Yeah, good times.
Please don't fulminate or sneer (or whatever else this is) on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something much better than this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And to expound, in my defense: as a longtime Android device user, I recall often feeling stigmatized by the app developer community's treatment of things outside the Apple ecosystem as second-class. Arc's overly-enthusiastic media coverage, barely disclaiming or discounting that it was initially MacOS exclusive, reminded me of the worst of that from the mid-2010s. "Here is a product that is going to change the world, and give everyone superpowers, also you can't use it. :)"
I'd thought we'd left that behind.
So if this approach turned out to be a misstep that helped lead to the product's demise (alongside, bafflingly, and perhaps ultimately a bullet-dodge, the mere fact that a local browser can be sunset and locked at all), I'm not allowed to give my feelings on that? Is there really no productive conversation to be had about how a failed product rubbed potential users the wrong way?
A one line comment that contains the phrases “no small amount of satisfaction and schadenfreude” and "shilled by the usual 'Apple supremacist' suspects” has a sneery, snarly energy to it that’s clearly outside what the guidelines are asking of us.
> Now I'm curious what nerve I hit
It’s nothing to do with hitting a nerve (and really, the suggestion has a touch of pathologizing about it). This is bog standard moderation of the kind we‘ve done routinely for many years.
This site exists for curious conversation and substantive discussion of topics. Schadenfreude, which literally means taking pleasure in others' misfortune, is never what we want here. It's fine to criticize things. We just need you to do it thoughtfully and congenially.