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.
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.
I think I saw something a while back that said they don't want to because they built a bunch of proprietary framework stuff that they want to keep for themselves cause they still use it in Dia.
People that trusted them deserve the bad taste. Don't expect them to lift a finger toward open source, they won't and expectations that there was even a chance is another over-extension of entirely unearned trust.
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.
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
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.
Crest (https://crestbrowser.com/) is a fairly new option that aims to bring most of Arc's features back. It still feels a bit immature but it does a lot already.
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).
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.
Personally, I just like the design of Zen more. With Firefox I felt like I was stuck with the same old UI forever. I'm not sure what Mozilla was doing with those bags of money from Google. I imagine Arc managed to do a lot more with their browser with way less money than Mozilla.
I find it odd Arc has AI garbage when Dia was supposed to be their AI browser. If they were going to put AI in Arc anyway, they should have stuck with one browser instead of rug pulling everyone right as it started to actually take off.
I’m pretty sure I saw more Arc videos posted after Dia than before. None of the people seemed to be aware that the browser they were pushing was effectively end of life.
> I find it odd Arc has AI garbage when Dia was supposed to be their AI browser.
Arc existed long before Dia, and had AI shoved into it when LLMs exploded, then the company decided to go all-in on an AI browser, Dia, and orphaned Arc...
I use Zen as my work browser but weirdly the developers seem to have a few Arc features they are actively opposed to despite ... let's say taking heavy inspiration from Arc otherwise. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the auto closing of tabs, and preventing websites from taking over certain keyboard shortcuts.
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.
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.
Crest (https://crestbrowser.com/) looks like an interesting option. You can use both Chrome and Safari as the backing engine, and its main goal is basically to replicate all of Arc's features. Still feels a bit immature but it already implements a lot of the functionality. I still haven't tried it as a full-time replacement but I just might with this annoucement.
Am using it right now. iCloud sync of tabs/spaces can get funky; zoom is persisted to the tab, not the host, which is just bizarre but there's a roadmap to correct that to what it should be; be nice if they implemented a native adblocker but otherwise this has been a solid experience.
Zen is great on Mac, but on Windows it is nowhere near how good Arc felt (on MacOS). I think this is just a problem with the OS, with it not supporting SwiftUI and all that, but nonetheless, there doesn't seem to be a good browser for Windows. I am still using Chrome on Windows because A) I already use it and B) Vertical tabs are usable, and C) I have enough RAM for it
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.
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.
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)
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.
One of my favorite parts of Arc was that they already discontinued new features. It’s perfect, I get to open the same tool every day with fresh chromium patches. I would gladly pay for this experience yet they never asked.
Anything else like Arc does too much. This is a true disappointment, coming from The Browser Company
Just migrated to Zen this afternoon using https://github.com/Thinkscape/arc-to-zen, it's ok so far. I tried Zen a few months ago and at the time it didn't feel great compared to Arc (some transitions were not very smooth, some things didn't work just like in Arc) but it's really improved. After just a few hours I don't really feel a difference.
As a bonus it's based on Firefox so uBlock Origin is available.
I saw it mostly in the new tab screen. When you type, there's an option to query chatgpt instead of doing a search/url input. ALso they bundled the Max AI which summarized pages. To me that was only useful to summarize pop culture chat stuff like "Why is XXXXXX getting cancelled?"
Damn 610m for something they never used, just like the sapphire company Apple acquired.
Something is super, super fucked up with valuation of companies and the profiteering of late stage capitalism for stuff like that to be able to happen.
No wonder lots of people are saying the world feels worse than ever, everything's expensive and it seems in many ways we've regressed rather than "made things better for our children".
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.
One could argue that what I really want is a tiling window manager with workspaces to swap around in, but really I want to keep my contexts separate and a command palette to swap between. e.g. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Screenshot_-_Convoke_be...
Obviously more interesting if I'd thought to screenshot prior to going to bed but you can have multiple tabs in a 'stream' and they can be terminal or web tabs. The relay (which I'm pentesting in the screenshot) transports the AI chats to a paired phone where they're adapted to have a common UI across the Claude / Codex / Oh My Pi that I use. You can obviously see the Arc lineage to the ideas here.
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.
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 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!
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'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...
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…
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.
Oh weird. I use Dia now and then and noticed my ability to upgrade vanished, but I still have access to all the AI features and the morning brief things. I just assumed the Atlassian acquisition made it free for everyone. Is that not the case? Do people here actually see a upgrade prompt?
192 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 81.9 ms ] threadLetter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709
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.
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...
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.
https://zen-browser.app/
They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...
I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.
Being paid to not compete. That includes taking any sort of UI risk that would lead to evolution.
I’m pretty sure I saw more Arc videos posted after Dia than before. None of the people seemed to be aware that the browser they were pushing was effectively end of life.
Arc existed long before Dia, and had AI shoved into it when LLMs exploded, then the company decided to go all-in on an AI browser, Dia, and orphaned Arc...
Just another example of a cancerous VC-backed business.
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.
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)
Dia now does appear now to have many of the Arc UX features. Plus AI.
Indeed, doesn’t look good at all.
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
There is no AI in it so far as I can tell, and I'm using it right now to type this comment. It's a chromium skin really, of course, but it's great.
Anything else like Arc does too much. This is a true disappointment, coming from The Browser Company
As a bonus it's based on Firefox so uBlock Origin is available.
Something is super, super fucked up with valuation of companies and the profiteering of late stage capitalism for stuff like that to be able to happen.
No wonder lots of people are saying the world feels worse than ever, everything's expensive and it seems in many ways we've regressed rather than "made things better for our children".
Obviously more interesting if I'd thought to screenshot prior to going to bed but you can have multiple tabs in a 'stream' and they can be terminal or web tabs. The relay (which I'm pentesting in the screenshot) transports the AI chats to a paired phone where they're adapted to have a common UI across the Claude / Codex / Oh My Pi that I use. You can obviously see the Arc lineage to the ideas here.
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.
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.
The auto-hiding sidebar, the pins, the smart folders, split tabs, command bar…
I will miss you Arc! Now to find a new browser ;(
If you want freedom, features and manifest v2 then just use and support Firefox.
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
You can get Claude Pro for $20/month and if you hook it into a browser, I'm not sure what you'd be missing out on from those listed perks.
I mean I get the benefit of a prepackaged experience but not at 5x the cost.