This was the browser that required an account to even start using, it was just ridiculous.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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It’s dead and they’re replacing it with an AI-first browser. Gross.
If you want the main things Arc gives you (vertical tabs, tab groups), you can get them with Firefox or a Firefox spinoff like Librewolf.
Zen browser is basically FireFox made to look like Arc
Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there's little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.
I... Think Zen offers a bit more than just vertical tabs over Firefox.
Plus, the vertical bar looks really fat compared to the top bar on Firefox, for no reason.
Yes, I am fat-shaming the vertical bar. It has no right to be that fat compared to the rest of the UI.
Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.
Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I'm typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.
The idea is to hide it altogether when you're not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.
you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.
I'm aware of this, but even that single row of icons is very fat compared to the rest of the bars that exist on the browser (e.g. the window bar, the bookmarks bar, the search bar, etc). It just looks out of place.
You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it's a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.
I don't know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they're in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just... hide it when I'm not tabbing, so it's not an issue at all for me. Although I'll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it's a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).
I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is... quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.
Haha, it's funny that you went that far. I think the reason why I notice it and you don't, is the 4k factor. My screen is 1920x1200 iirc.
Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.
But yeah, if you're already in a 19:10 display you generally won't want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It's probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.
Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We're in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.
Zen also attempts to remove the telemetry that firefox has baked in.
But Zen also has features other than just vertical tabs that are really useful, like Glance.
I really like the split view in Zen. I wish it supported drag and dropping links across pages but it's still handy.
Firefox vertical tabs are lackluster though, you don't have pinned and essential tabs on FF, and you also miss out on Glance (the pop out link feature), basically the main features it copied from Arc. Honestly it's been very stable for me, and it's matured enough that I'd recommend giving it another shot.
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Zen is a lot more than just vertical tabs. And I have never run into any "pains and bugs".
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Why do people want vertical tabs? It feels as if it just takes up more space, and my muscle memory after all these years makes me move to the top. I always go back to horizontal tabs after using vertical tabs for a day.
Because web content is increasingly mobile and vertical-oriented. So the horizontal space is usually empty anyway.
Sometimes new things take time to get used to but if you try it for more than a single day you may find that you like it.
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because when you have more than 8 tabs open on a horizontal tab row, the tab handles start to become narrower and tab titles become unreadable and almost useless. with vertical tabs tab titles can be as long as you see fit, and the tab title does not take away space from other tab handles so more can fit. essentially its more space efficient I think.
but I don't use it because my firefox theme breaks down when I set up vertical tabs, and everything will be white, even though I don't even use userchrome customizations
I prefer the overview I get with them. I’m on an ultrawide monitor so it’s not like I’m sacrificing horizontal space either.
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tab groups in firefox are surprisingly good! even alongside a tab group management addon. they complement each other, like when you don't want to create a bunch of subgroups for an exclusive view but just collapse them
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No shit it died. They stopped supporting it and on top of it it’s a browser that requires you to be logged into an account to use, which is a turnoff to techie people who are the most likely to adopt nee things early.
Oh and Microsoft Edge can do most of the things Arc does.
Yep. Save reason I won't use Kagi and I don't use AI much. Surveillance capitalism will only ever lead to authoritarianism and dystopia. I don't want anything to do with it.
You can't trust any company to not sell you out and pick your carcass clean.
Isn’t kagi's point that they store very little about you to the point there no search history and you have to pay for the service provided?
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Can you cite me some instances of surveillance from Kagi? Genuinely asking.
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Never heard of that thing, but apparently it was Apple exclusives? Deserved death then.
I'm hoping ladybug will be operational for mainstream use, before the enshittification of Firefox progresses too far.
Its not apple exclusive. I have it on both my macbook and windows computer
It wasn't supposed to stay Apple exclusive. In fact, when I last used Windows there was a beta build out for Arc. However, there were also multiple Firefox styles in the CSS Store that made Firefox into Arc.
Then Zen Browser came out, and I'm currently watching it get very popular. I don't doubt that Zen Browser is one of the reasons Arc is shutting down. It's nearly an exact copy, but now with more features (and is constantly coming out with even more faster than Arc can think of them).
I'm excited for Ladybird as well, but I'm not expecting anything crazy when it comes out of alpha and beta. I fully expect to wait a bit, maybe download to contribute some troubleshooting, but it may not be viable as a main use browser for a long time yet.
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When I eventually managed to test Arc, I felt it was a very overhyped browser. I couldn't see what the fuss was about.
Zen Browser is open source and in active development!
I guess they lost their only selling point when Firefox added vertical tabs…
Also Zen exists, which is a Firefox fork that implements the concept of Arc
The Devs at the browser company said themselves that they aren't killing Arc, it's just on maintenance mode as they are working on another browser, an AI first one, which I have mixed feelings about personally.
Never even heard of it until now.
It probably has something to do with being only available on Macs for so long.
Or them completely shifting development to their AI browser
what a fucking joke, the best thing it did was create the zen browser project, and before that Vivaldi existed that took the spot of zen without the hype
No Linux build, not git link, why would anyone care?
Because 96% of people aren't using Linux to browse the web.
That figure is entirely irrelevant when you need to target users who are willing to try a new unknown third party browser in the first place.
And you'll find orders of magnitude more of those among Linux users than you do on Mac, which is where Arc launched on.
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The Browser Company, the developer behind the Arc Browser, has announced that Arc is going away
Where? Where did they do this? Why is there no link? They said several times, very recently, that it was not going away. They were just basically going into maintenance mode.
please know this: we’re not trying to shut Arc down.
That's very sad to hear. I am currently using Arc as my main browser for work (I am a web developer) since its launch on MacOS. Guess I need to switch browsers soon then...
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So, no Windows, no Linux, no head?
There is a windows and mobile tab on their website
I really liked the layout of Arc, but ended up going back to Firefox because uBlock still works on it.
Try Zen, it used Arc as its main inspiration for the UI and features
It was a fun little experiment to use for about 15 minutes. Won’t miss it.
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