Writing was on the wall once they pivoted to Dia, I'm pretty happy having switched to Zen (though for a few things that matter, it's Firefox-based not Chrome).
Are the shortcuts for moving between tabs and spaces good? I can see the appeal of the sidebar and the split view is genuinely cool, but it's features, like glance, feels really cursor heavy. Clicking on a page and then going back to the search results is so fast with a keyboard or track gestures. I want fewer mouse movements not more.
They're pretty good. There's a shortcut settings that lets you assign shortcuts for moving between spaces. I use Tridactyl for moving between tabs, though.
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)
Maybe I haven't looked too deep into Firefox multi-profile config, but:
- 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.
Alas! I made the jump to Zen browser but shitty support for audio share across tabs made work impossible. So back to Chrome (yes, need Google Meet for livelihood).
Zen turned to shit for me in the last month. So many stupid bugs started happening. For example, clicking on exes in the downloads would retrigger the download instead of running the file. Random crashes. I was able to drag the whole window by clicking on random parts of the page (I noticed this as I highlight text during reading). It got very slow. I tried to report these but the button to report would actually redirect to Firefox's feedback page lol.
I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.
I had to look Arc up because I forgot what it was. For others confused like me:
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)
I was confused because the programming language that Hacker News is written in is also called Arc and I was like "Wait, did PG turn over maintenance to an independent foundation? Are they giving up now? What does this mean for HN?"
I made two additional wrong guesses, the Advanced RISC Computer class of machine firmware and the file archiving utility from System Enhancement Associates. (-:
(Back when the headline was "Arc is Sunsetting". I am so 2 minutes ago.)
Note that Arc had no or minimal AI when it launched; its appeal for so many of us was its refreshing opinionated stance on the browser UX. The AI hype train hit them hard and they tried to pivot to Dia, which leaned fully into AI but did none of the fancy UX things that Arc did. From what I could see online most of the fans they attracted with Arc were turned off by the pivot. It was peak early AI hype, which didn’t help: so much more smoke and so much less fire than there is now.
Dia now does appear now to have many of the Arc UX features. Plus AI.
Arc was a beautiful browser to use, but they lost a lot of my trust after that massive security vuln that they shipped as a silly customization feature
Damn. I’ve been riding hard for Arc since I installed it years ago. Dia looks like it has a lot of the same UI sugar thankfully, tho I’m sure there are things I’ll hate.
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.
I switched back to Arc a few weeks into Dia because there are so many powerful features they refused to port to Dia. I submitted them as tickets, answered their forms, replied to their "what Arc features should we bring to Dia" twitter posts and still they never made it.
I'll miss Arc but got fed up about 4 months ago and switched to Safari with a combination of SupaSidebar[1] for the spaces/vertical tabs and OpenIn [2] for Air Traffic Control. I'm pretty happy with it!
I was quite angry when they first announced that they weren't going to support Arc last year and refused to switch to their new 'AI-powered' Dia browser.
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.
That’s neat, but I don’t understand in what world I would migrate to a browser made by the people who just killed their browser after promising it would be maintained indefinitely. Especially after being bought by Atlassian, who has an almost perfect track record of ruining or sunsetting nearly every acquisition.
Makes me wonder what would have been if they had just continued on with Arc and implemented Dia features there, instead of flushing all that user goodwill down the toilet when they announced that Arc development was ending last year.
Does Dia or Zen have an api I can point Claude Code to? It would be nice to sort tabs via Claude Code, that already has my context. Tried doing it with Firefox, but requires awkward workarounds.
should have just open sourced arc instead of sunsetting it. dia feels incomplete.
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.
I have seen the Arc posts here and on r/browsers over the years so I am loosely familiar with it, but what is Dia? The post doesn't say and doesn't even link to it. Venture capital funded, closed source, and AI... doesn't sound good.
Posting from Ladybird BTW (compiled from git today), which is starting to take shape!
I've been using Arc for years now and am really sad to see it being sunset, but am now trying my luck with Zen browser. I'd really want to be on Dia as I have much respect for its original creators, but Atlassian being behind it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I even tried to import my Arc account into Dia to get everything done and dusted quickly, but it failed to do so, asked me to try again in a few minutes or contact Atlassian support...
Enjoyed using it to start with but soon returned to Chrome. Now I have a personal browser/terminal hybrid I use. Lots of the ideas from arc were good. Sidebar tabs, splits, page editability.
As someone who loved Arc a lot and is still using it, this is sad to see. It also annoys me because they had such a clear path to success with such a huge head start. I was rooting for them. It was obvious there was an opportunity to build a much better browser, but the team couldn't figure out how to bring those changes into a browser we knew and were familiar with.
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.
I remember back when they launched a lot of people, myself included, were skeptical of their business model and the CEO told everyone not to worry about it. Turns out they were right lol
I really enjoyed using arc years ago. But I also remember asking the devs, both on a livestream and over email, what their plan was to build a sustainable business. They obviously had no answer because their real plan was to entice users to join while surviving on VC funding, then eventually sell user data or squeeze value out of them some other way. Left a bad taste in my mouth so I stopped using their products.
Just another example of a cancerous VC-backed business.
Oh well, looks like I'm going to need a new browser. "Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI." I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.
Such a braindead move. You go to the Dia product page and it looks exactly the same as Arc. What’s the point? Just keep improving Arc. I know that back when they originally abandoned Arc, Dia looked like a generic Google Chrome clone with AI stapled on, but I cannot imagine what good reason they had at all to give up Arc and burn their entire user base along the way. I’m not a paying user, so I guess they don’t care about me after all.
This is honestly very sad news. The Arc UX is still my favorite desktop browser UX out there even to this day, even though feature development stopped over a year ago!
The auto-hiding sidebar, the pins, the smart folders, split tabs, command bar…
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.
Every night I update the browser from upstream and do a rebuild. It is a bit cumbersome right now as I have to run it on an SSD attached to my mac. The whole codebase requires quite a bit of storage that I don't have a maxed enough mac for.
I might look into being able to build it on a server at some point, but it works for me.
Most Arc users have long since migrated to Zen. I personally have never liked either of them. It's hard to step away from Vivaldi. Although Vivaldi runs Chromium, it in 2026 is basically what Opera 12 was in 2016 (before they crippled the browser with the Chromium re-write). Vivaldi just has too many features. The only browser I've found that is comparable to Vivaldi's feature-set and customizability is Floorp.
i too like vivaldi for the same reasons. i use brave, chrome for google stuff, firefox if i need a third browser but i use vivaldi mostly. except on mac where i still use safari
You could try Zen browser. It's like Arc, but Firefox based. Or if you like Chromium engine you could try Helium Browser, which I moved to personally and never looked back.
Another Apple Silicon only app, another pass. This one doesn't even do you the courtesy of informing you you're downloading an Apple Silicon only binary, just presumes you're not on Intel. I honestly don't understand the thinking behind not clicking the checkbox for the universal binary when compiling.
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.
Never trust a VC-backed founder who says, "don't worry ___ is not leaving"
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.
Indefinitely doesn't mean infinitely, it just means there is no defined end date at this particular moment. But that could change in the next moment, as it did.
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.
As of today the eco-system favors a VC backed company for visibility and more. Building a company itself is hard, bootstrapping it when there are VCs willing to fund you feels like an unnecessary risk.
Dia has sidebar tabs now, but it feels half baked, e.g. hide the sidebar will show the top bar.
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.
https://zen-browser.app/
They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...
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)
- 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.
I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.
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)
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
(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.
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.
Bacause I don’t want to be pushed towards a $100 per month plan where the «key feature» is an AI morning brief.
https://www.diabrowser.com/plans
1 - https://supasidebar.com 2 - https://loshadki.app/openin4/
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.
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.
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!
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.
Just another example of a cancerous VC-backed business.
The auto-hiding sidebar, the pins, the smart folders, split tabs, command bar…
I will miss you Arc! Now to find a new browser ;(
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.
The zen of this position is severely underrated.
I might look into being able to build it on a server at some point, but it works for me.
Hopefully it might get open sourced.
Letter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709
If you want freedom, features and manifest v2 then just use and support Firefox.
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.
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).
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.