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 really like the split view in Zen. I wish it supported drag and dropping links across pages but it's still handy.
Zen is a lot more than just vertical tabs. And I have never run into any "pains and bugs".
Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.
Same. I've been using it daily for the best part of a year and it's been pretty pleasant to use throughout.
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.
Makes sense. The sites I am using most probably have not adopted the new style yet. And like I said, the hardest part is the muscle memory of looking at the top for my tabs and moving my mouse to the top to select a tab.
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.
Yeah, on a widescreen or 4K, I can see the appeal.
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.
i would like to move from zen to firefox, but as of right now i’m somewhat unhappy with the vertical tabs in firefox. i’ll keep an eye on them though and make the switch once they got some more features (like only appearing when mousing to the left edge of the window and staying entirely hidden otherwise)
You should try the Shimmer userchrome tweaks along with the Sideberry extension. With both of them it's even better than Zen IMO.
thanks a lot, i’ll check them out!
You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it'd take me longer to adapt to that when moving back from Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it's pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.
I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I'm quite happy with it now. I'd have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn't just use the engine, but it's also hooked up to Firefox's account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn't seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?
Zen makes something like 84 external connections, which is around double what even Edge makes (and Microsoft has basically become a malware company).
This was patched, and the vast majority were just fetching thumbnails.
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
Does any other browser let me open 2 windows with the same synced tabs? Also, permanent per-space tabs, please.
Zen does
Ok, thanks! Good to know there's a backup plan. For now Arc still works fine, just no updates anymore.
They're obviously going for a zero adoption policy and trying to think of the most repulsive options
Never even heard of it until now.
Zen Browser is open source and in active development!
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.
LOL no. 96% is not irrelevant. 4% is irrelevant.
it couldn't be too popular as a windows only project. I assume it was too lite known, like I never even heard about it here or other places
It probably has something to do with being only available on Macs for so long.
Or them completely shifting development to their AI browser
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.
When I eventually managed to test Arc, I felt it was a very overhyped browser. I couldn't see what the fuss was about.
It was a fun little experiment to use for about 15 minutes. Won’t miss it.
Most regular people just use what came with their computer, unfortunately.
So this is a case of a company that made a browser to appeal to techies that didn't see widespread adoption, is pivoting to a new browser that is focused on the central conceit of a product that most techies decry...
Read the room, Arc. Read the room.
So, no Windows, no Linux, no head?
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
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...
It's not dead. As far as I can tell the author just made that up, because they didn't cite any sources, and the actual official sources indicate otherwise. But I can recommend switching to Zen nonetheless.
with the TF2 engineer's voice
THE ARC IS DEAD?
I hated arc but I really really wanted to like it. It was just too awkward to use
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