So long, Arc.
Arc has been dethroned by the Zen Browser.
I've been a loyal Arc Browser user and fan for a while, but The Browser Company's recent announcement that they would step back from developing Arc and that they would now be focusing on developing a new web browser called "Dia" made me feel a bit betrayed. This came right after they had just made a bunch of big promises about a major update to Arc, codenamed "Arc 2.0." But now, they said, "Actually, we think Arc is a completed product," despite the fact that Arc still had so much to continue to work on, especially with their Windows version.
While I could have just kept using Arc until it eventually died off, that's just not my style. It was time to find a new browser. Arc was hard to leave, though—I had grown fond of its vertical tabs and its many other niceties. And, to put it simply, I now knew that something better was possible for a web browser, and I couldn't just go back. My old web browsers just didn't cut it anymore, so I began the search to find a new one.
After checking out the usual suspects, like Firefox and Brave, I gave the Orion browser another try. I had used Orion before, but only to test it out. Orion is like Safari, but better, and it's made by the team behind my favorite search engine, Kagi. It seemed like a good option, but while it was a good browser, honestly, a very good browser, it still felt like a web browser of old; it was very much a "pre-Arc" web browser. Sure, it had vertical tabs, profiles, and other features that made it better than other "pre-Arc" browsers, including a tight integration with Kagi, but it wasn't an Arc replacement by any means.
Somehow, I eventually stumbled upon the Zen Browser. At the time (which, again, was only a few months ago), Zen was still in alpha, and it definitely felt like it. Despite that, it was looking promising. It had a lot of the features I was looking for in a web browser, and it was built on Firefox, which is a plus in a browser landscape dominated by Chromium-based browsers. Even though it was at a state that I was willing to put up with, it was definitely not something that I would recommend to others, at least not yet.
In these past few months, though, the team behind the Zen Browser has been working overtime to make the browser feel even better to use with each update, and they've been adding new features, squashing bugs, and making the general user experience even better. The improvements they've made have made Zen look less like a Firefox fork and more like a refined version of the Arc Browser. All that is to say that Zen has evolved dramatically. Zen has exited its alpha stage and is now in beta. The browser now feels native to MacOS (and to other operating systems, I've heard) and is just overall very nice to use. It's kept all the things that I loved about the Arc Browser and refined them. Switching from Arc to Zen now truly feels like an upgrade.
The only thing I'm still missing from the Arc Browser is tab folders, but the devs are working on it. Last I checked, they were waiting for Firefox to release their version of tab groups so that they could piggyback off that implementation, rather than having to build their own implementation completely from scratch.
Another thing I like about Zen is that it's easier to move to Zen Browser from a more traditional browser like Chrome or Firefox than Arc ever was. Zen brings new ideas to the browser, but keeps enough of the features of a traditional browser, like the bookmarks bar, that makes it easier to dip your toe in than Arc, which made you abandon basically everything you knew about from your old browser.
The Zen Browser is a beautiful browser and an even better Arc replacement. It's open source, privacy-respecting, has a beautiful UI, and is available for all desktop operating systems: Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's improved so much in the past few months from where it was in its alpha stage that I can say it's a browser that I can now confidently recommend. I'm even willing to say that it's currently the best desktop web browser.
The Zen team is really doing great work, and they deserve so much support. If you're interested, you can download Zen on their website and also donate to the devs there if you'd like.
