A farewell to Arc browser

Posted by suhdonghwi 3 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by hbn 1 minute ago

I'm still not sure what Arc offered that can't be solved if you know OS shortcuts which also work across all your apps.

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 and none of the solutions seem more convenient.

Comment by jamie_ca 3 hours ago

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).

https://zen-browser.app/

They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...

Comment by BoxwoodSeed 13 minutes ago

If only Zen was in the repositories of my Linux system, I'd have given it a try. Not a fan of running a browser of all things from outside the repositories.

Comment by forgotpwd16 6 minutes ago

Should maybe request it then.

Comment by summermusic 2 hours ago

+1 for Zen. It's got a lot of Arc's neat UX but without all the AI garbage.

Comment by mostlysimilar 2 hours ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Firefox have all those features? Why put third party intermediary between you and the source?

Comment by ciefa 2 hours ago

1) No they don't 2) Zen had them first

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)

Comment by accidc 31 minutes ago

Could you list a couple of things you find wierd? Wondering if its worth switching

Comment by tethys 14 minutes ago

Not OP, but I am not a fan of the newly introduced library. Exploring my history is bad in Firefox, and this is even worse. It doesn’t show full page titles, so it’s almost impossible to find the right page.

Comment by jamie_ca 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by TSiege 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by zeendo 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by whywhywhywhy 17 minutes ago

The pivot from one new browser to another new ai browser was insanely bad optics and aura loss.

Comment by ahurmazda 2 hours ago

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).

Comment by paufernandez 2 hours ago

Oh! Nice surprise, switched instantly! Love it!

Comment by trehans 3 hours ago

I looked at this a while back but couldn't figure out how to migrate bookmarks from Arc to Zen. Is that possible now?

Comment by lnenad 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by Aurornis 2 hours ago

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)

Comment by jerlam 1 hour ago

I think development was halted on Arc, and Dia was announced before the acquisition.

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

Comment by nostrademons 2 hours ago

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?"

Comment by JdeBP 2 hours ago

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.)

Comment by oldfuture 2 hours ago

the privacy of this one doesn't look so good tbh https://www.diabrowser.com/privacy

Comment by catoc 18 minutes ago

Your IP address, IP address-location data, device ID, the pages you visit using Dia and queries submitted, and other “User Content”.

Indeed, doesn’t look good at all.

Comment by drewbeck 2 hours 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.

Comment by maccard 2 hours ago

Sometimes I wish I had the gall to bolt AI on to something and sell it for _half a billion dollars_ only to sunset it a year later.

Comment by InsideOutSanta 1 hour ago

Arc was already essentially discontinued in favor of Dia when they were acquired. It only received bugfixes.

Comment by glenstein 2 hours ago

Also it was YACB (yet another chromium browser), as is the successor browser Dia.

Comment by wave84 3 minutes ago

This is kinda sad, Arc was the perfect browser for me. I wanted to give it a shot and download Dia, but cancelled the download when I noticed it was 861 MB large. That seems... absurd. For reference, the entire Windows 2000 installation kit was something like 370 MB. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was 4.7 MB. Apples and oranges perhaps, but still, what is going on with software these days?

Comment by app 1 hour ago

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!

1 - https://supasidebar.com 2 - https://loshadki.app/openin4/

Comment by frmersdog 54 seconds ago

I feel no small amount of satisfaction and schadenfreude, considering how hard this thing was shilled by the usual "Apple supremacist" suspects.

Comment by jimmydoe 25 minutes ago

Zen is buggy, much less buggy than before but still buggy.

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.

Comment by kvam 1 hour ago

I will not switch to Dia, however easy they make it. Why?

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

Comment by drewbeck 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by simjnd 2 hours ago

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.

Dia is a joke.

Comment by timpera 2 hours ago

Yes, Dia has that "Arc feel", at least on macOS, it's very nice to use. Sadly, it still doesn't have all of Arc's features (I'll miss Boosts).

Comment by nicce 2 hours ago

Is account mandatory? Do I remember correctly that Arc used to have and it was quite blocker.

Comment by kvam 1 hour ago

Dia has a pretty hefty paid plan last time I checked, and so you will be using a browser constantly pushing you from free towards paid.

Comment by slipwalker 3 hours ago

would be most gracious from them to open-source it. It would completely removes the bad aftertaste from those who trusted the product and the company.

Comment by SomeonesAccount 2 hours ago

yeah that would be the absolute best possible thing for them to do

Comment by swyx 1 hour ago

yes please ^ browser company engs!

Comment by wrxd 7 minutes ago

Arc felt designed for the general public, Dia feels very much designed for a project manager that spends all of its day in web applications.

Even the login screen asked for “your work email”…

Comment by falloon 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by jdgoesmarching 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by Pfhortune 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by swyx 1 hour ago

>As much as Josh is a tool

did you really have to include that? without substantiation this is just a mean offhand side swipe.

Comment by tech_ken 33 minutes ago

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

Comment by yamanahlawat 59 minutes ago

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.

Comment by aorth 2 hours ago

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!

Comment by jhaile 1 hour ago

I've tried switching from Arc to Dia several times over the past year and Dia was always significantly worse. I tried again today after the news.

The main features I miss from Arc are Peek, Air Traffic Control, and Nested Folders.

Comment by tuzemec 26 minutes ago

Air Traffic Control is the thing that kept me on Arc.

Comment by usrme 2 hours ago

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...

Comment by estetlinus 38 minutes ago

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.

Comment by sanderjd 14 minutes ago

I wanted this for awhile, but actually now I kind of like having vanilla Chrome for browser automation only, and a different browser that I actually use.

Comment by arjie 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by yeutterg 2 hours ago

Curious about the terminal part of this!

Comment by admjs 2 hours ago

As am I

Comment by lowkey_ 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by shikshake 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by jjuel 2 hours ago

So the new browser uses AI to read your tabs? No thanks!

Comment by juicypeach 2 hours ago

What makes you think they were not reading your tabs in Arc?

Comment by jjuel 2 hours ago

I guess I don't know. To be fair I didn't use Arc much since I was mostly on Linux. And haven't used it in maybe a year or so.

Comment by impure 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by odo1242 2 hours ago

Zen Browser is what I've been using (https://zen-browser.app/)

Comment by stevenhubertron 1 hour ago

Arc was the only good product they had. What a self own. To see a company fall this hard is crazy. It will be studied like Perplexity.

Comment by davidd_1004 30 minutes ago

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

Comment by aliasxneo 58 minutes ago

Why do I see so many suggestions for Helium? It looks nothing like Arc. What am I missing?

Comment by SomeonesAccount 1 hour ago

Looking forward to Radian browser, it looks like Arc but is made by an individual, not a company

Comment by st-isidore 3 minutes ago

What is it, link?

Comment by crab_galaxy 2 hours ago

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…

I will miss you Arc! Now to find a new browser ;(

Comment by IneffablePigeon 46 minutes ago

Open source it, cowards

Comment by pixeljam 28 minutes ago

most interesting footgun ever

Comment by terabytest 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by zachwdc 3 hours ago

Arc users, what are you moving to?

Comment by mosselman 2 hours ago

I’ve built my own, Ariadne.

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.

Comment by rglover 1 hour ago

> Nobody but me has it and it is great!

The zen of this position is severely underrated.

Comment by ValentineC 2 hours ago

How are you handling upstream updates?

Comment by mosselman 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by herunan 37 minutes ago

Moved to Zen as soon as I noticed Arc went on maintenance mode. Never looked back.

Comment by jotato 3 hours ago

I moved to the Helium browser several months ago.

Comment by juicypeach 3 hours ago

Same. I love it.

Comment by brzz 2 hours ago

n'thed

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by knes 2 hours ago

I've been on Helium for some time. it's great (for now)

Comment by Ardakilic 2 hours ago

Helium browser. Never looked back.

Comment by uriahlight 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by jaffa2 2 hours ago

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

Comment by odo1242 2 hours ago

I'm on Zen Browser

Comment by mjazwiecki 3 hours ago

maybe good time to reverse engineer it using AI and then open source it?

Comment by deppep 2 hours ago

once again, back to firefox

Comment by Ardakilic 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by HackerThemAll 2 hours ago

I found it funny that people use Chromium-based browsers and pretend they're unique.

If you want freedom, features and manifest v2 then just use and support Firefox.

Comment by SomeonesAccount 1 hour ago

They are unique. The UX of Arc was (and still is) MUCH, MUCH better than Chrome's. Or Firefox's. Or Helium's. Or Edge's.

Comment by ghusto 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by j45 1 hour ago

It's too bad, this had some nice features.

Hopefully it might get open sourced.

Comment by sellmesoap 1 hour ago

Well that arc was shorter then I expected.

Comment by 28304283409234 1 hour ago

well arctually....

Comment by tinyhouse 3 hours ago

Is this just the product Arc or the entire company? (The Browser Company)

Comment by joelboersma 2 hours ago

The Browser Company still exists developing Dia, after being acquired by Atlassian a while ago

Comment by juicypeach 2 hours ago

Just Arc browser. They still have Dia.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago

Previously in May 2025:

Letter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709

Comment by nekooooo 1 hour ago

Dia is terrible. Time for me to swtich to a different browser that has the sidebar tabs.

Comment by jhaile 1 hour ago

To be fair, they have added most of the Arc features into Dia now - the ones I still miss are Peek, Air Traffic Control, and Nested Folders (!?)

Comment by esafak 2 hours ago

I tried it briefly, but it just did not solve a pain point for me. I want my browser to be faster and lighter, not whatever Arc did.

Comment by ramon156 1 hour ago

without sounding dense, can anyone tell me why i wouldve even considered trying Arc? just seemed like a hype train with no goal

Comment by avazhi 52 minutes ago

lol

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.

Comment by an0malous 3 hours ago

Never trust a product that takes VC funding. Take advantage of the subsidized prices but have your backup ready.

Comment by allenleee 2 hours ago

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.

https://www.theverge.com/news/674603/arc-browser-development...

Comment by pphysch 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by pessimizer 2 hours ago

> Indefinitely doesn't mean infinitely

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.

Comment by pphysch 2 hours ago

I agree it's confusing, but that's the point, it's a weasel word.

No court of law is going to accept an argument that indefinite == infinite, especially after it stops being indefinite (like TFA).

Comment by sandeepkd 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by inhumantsar 3 hours ago

what was Arc's business model even?

Comment by Almondsetat 3 hours ago

uber for browsing the web

Comment by timpera 2 hours ago

It was based on a future "Arc for Teams" offering and a "Boosts" (= browsing personalizations) marketplace: https://youtu.be/eVda3zFLlhc?si=a7avuRAqq2KlvpG5&t=338

Comment by colesantiago 2 hours ago

> Never trust a product that takes VC funding.

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.

Comment by Lalabadie 2 hours ago

Sometimes I think I exaggerate how far into their own bubble the YC comments are.

Comment by vinyl7 2 hours ago

How about by making money like businesses used to do in the olden days

Comment by colesantiago 2 hours ago

Nope, Most people want services for free and now with vibe coding you can make your own.

Not sustainable for anyone wanting to charge for software.

Comment by c-hendricks 2 hours ago

And when VC services enshittify so that the VC funders can get their money back, the market won’t also respond with vibing their own version?

Comment by colesantiago 1 hour ago

Support and donate regularly to OSS or vibe code your own!

Unless of course you're Stripe (which is VC funded) we still need an OSS version of Stripe.