I never truly understood why people are abandoning Arc when it still works as good as ever. I’ve seem some people say it’s because it’s abandonware and only being merely maintained, but I haven’t noticed any change in performance since when I first used it two years ago.

I doubt the BC will actually end up folding it entirely when this is their most acclaimed product. I’d bet that eventually they’ll just realize Dia sucks and go back to full time working on Arc.

I have moved today and it seems like what Dia was aiming to be but all that AI stuff kept getting in the way. Things are developing but this seems the most promising.
If anyone is working towards a transition, I would highly recommend this.

Just tried Dia, see if it might works for me. I imported the tabs/bookmarks from Arc and this is the result.

I mean, for f**k sake, this even works between Chrome, Safari & Firefox, how are they able to mess this up with their own browser where they want you to switch from one to the other?

Still on Arc but it's clearly in maintenance mode and I'm finally shopping around. So far I've tried:

• Zen: closest to Arc's look, but feels like a lot of setup
• Dia: interesting, but not sure I want to go from one Browser Company product to another
• Ace: more normal looking, the AI stuff is more useful than I expected

What did you all move to and are you happy with it? Mostly care about tab sanity and not having to rebuild my whole setup.

Are there any good Arc alternatives for Windows besides Zen? Most of what I've seen is for macOS.

I'm looking to test out an arc alternative for a while while. For those of you who have recently tried both - which do you prefer and why? I heard Dia added a lot of Arc features recently but that it's still far from Arc. Zen looks awesome but I've been a chrome/chromium user practically since it was first released and a bit nervous to switch my ecosystem.

Hi, first: I loooveeee Arc. It's all great and I am not a huge nerd and do not want to invest lots of times and use all the features etc - I find arc very convenient, especially that it synchs on my phone (iphone) as well as my two computers (both Mac). But the good old problem: it's draining my batteries. I don't care about AI (matter of fact I despise it), but I do enjoy the interface of Arc and how intuitive it works, that it cleans all the tabs after a day of work or when I close my home computer I immediately have every tab open on my other one.

I read about Zen and about Dia but honestly it's so many options. Which one would you recommend to me? I'd just like to migrate smoothly and give it a try. Thanks a lot in advance!

It seems there’s side projects and a mixed of projects and copies, but has anyone decided to unit under a single roof? If there’s interest and it doesn’t exist I’ll happily standup a United arc rebuild community and link it.

Also we should all it ‘Form’ btw, but we should run it like more like a coordinated effort, not a mix of features. There are a few ways we can do it actually.

Thoughts? Let’s figure this out.

Long-time Arc user here. I tried Dia when it launched and honestly, it wasn’t even close to replacing Arc for me.

I tried again a few months later. Same conclusion. Too many of the things that made Arc great were still missing.

I checked it out again recently and was pretty surprised by how much has changed. Most of what kept me on Arc is now there:

• Spaces / Profiles
• Vertical tabs + sidebar
• Pinned tabs & Favorites
• Tab Groups
• Split View
• Automatic Tab Cleanup
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Chrome extensions
• And obviously, Dia’s AI stuff

Also worth mentioning: you can now import your Arc setup directly into Dia, which made testing it properly without rebuilding my whole setup much less annoying.

I’m a pretty hardcore Arc user, so I genuinely didn’t expect to say this, but I’ve now switched and don’t really feel like I’m missing my Arc workflow anymore.

There are basically two small things left for me:

• Auto Tidy Tabs : automatically organizing open tabs into relevant groups. Honestly, this is more of a nice-to-have. It was cool in Arc, but I can definitely live without it.
• Nested dropdown folders : this is probably the only thing I actually miss. Being able to put dropdown folders inside other dropdown folders was really useful for more complex Spaces.

Although I’m starting to wonder if the lack of nested folders is intentional… maybe Dia is just forcing us to stop nesting 25 folders inside 25 other folders and finally clean up our mess 😂

Other than that, I genuinely don’t feel like I’m missing much anymore.

If, like me, you tested Dia months ago and thought “yeah, no way this replaces Arc” — just FYI, the Dia of today is very different from the one we originally tried.

Thought this was worth sharing here because I imagine quite a few of us tried it once and never looked at it again.

Curious what features you guys are still missing from Arc.

Got this email. I'm suspicious but I guess I'll finally give a try to Dia.

I still use Arc Browser as my daily browser on my mac and I didn't look for alternatives for the past 6 months.

Just wanted to know if it's just me or there are other users like me?

Hey everyone,

On Chrome/Opera/Safari, I used to be able to drag the lock/URL icon directly from the address bar to my desktop/Finder to instantly create a .webloc shortcut file.

In Arc, dragging the URL or site icon from the address bar (or dragging the tab from the sidebar) directly into Finder results in a plain .txt file containing the URL string instead of a native .webloc shortcut.

Has anyone found a clean workaround or a quick gesture/shortcut for generating actual .webloc files directly from Arc?

Thanks!

Codex can control your browser through OpenAI's ChatGPT extension, but Arc isn't supported. If you install the extension in Arc anyway, it connects and then hangs on the first tab Codex opens.

The cause is actually the same as something which happens for Claude's browser-use plugin too (thanks u/No_Glass_2870!), which is Arc's tab groups: the extension groups every tab it opens, and Arc never answers the tab-group API. I made a small tool that downloads the official extension, verifies it, patches that one step out, and gives you a copy to load in Arc. You get:

- Codex's regular browser use in Arc: it opens tabs, navigates, reads pages, clicks and types in your profiles.

- Codex stops opening background Chrome tabs

- You can see which tab Codex is controlling (and it won't jump you to that tab): its favicon gets a cursor badge in Arc's sidebar.

- It survives updates -- just re-run the build when a new version of the extension comes out.

To set it up you can paste this link into Codex and it should handle most of the work for you.

https://github.com/brianlzhou/arc-browser-use/blob/main/SETUP.md

FYI: You'll need to turn on Developer mode for it to work, and the ChatGPT side panels that the Chrome extension has won't work. But any of your CLI/desktop Codex sessions will be able to detect and use it.

Loved ARC. The only real innovation in the browser space in decades. However, I abandoned it once the developer did. Not a fan of AI in my software so DIA wasn't on the radar. However, I tried it out a about a month ago - because it has many of the ARC features I enjoyed. (tabs management, profiles, mostly) What I've found is that the free version ticks the boxes for me and the AI isn't not essential or in the way. I'm inclined to stick with it given that its basically the closets option to ARC itself and is actively developed by the same developer. Am I missing anything in staying with DIA?

Unlike Chrome, Arc doesn't let you manually group your own tabs. You can use the tidy function to create automatic groups, but you can't rename them, reorder them, add them, etc.

I made a python script that lets you organize your tabs with your own groupings.

https://github.com/jmangel/arc-manual-tab-groups

If you make improvements, please make a pull request! If you want me to make improvements, please file an issue!

Using this tool, it's recommended to quit Arc first, but you don't need to. The reason is that it updates a file that Arc is constantly both writing and reading state to, so if you don't quit Arc it's possible that the changes will be applied to a slightly stale sync file, though honestly I haven't tested it out much and it's probably fine to do so, assuming you aren't making a bunch of changes to arc tabs while you're running this script.

Hey everyone! 👋

Like many of you, I fell in love with Arc's vertical navigation and sidebar-centric layout. However, with the recent shift in focus away from Arc's core browser development, I wanted to keep the similar sleek experience on top of Google Chrome. (i know not the same) I designed this for those who have to use Chrome for some reason but desire Arc.

So I built Arc Style Side Panel—a lightweight, open-source Chrome Extension (Manifest V3) using Chrome's native Side Panel API.

✨ Features:

• 📌 4-Column Drag & Drop Favorites: Smooth matrix-shift animation (up to 8 pinned sites).
• 🎨 Glassmorphic UI & Custom Themes: Adjustable gradient background, noise/grain texture, and dark/light contrast adjustment.
• 📁 Hierarchical Bookmarks: Interactive open/closed vector folder states + custom emoji overrides.
• 🌐 Multi-language & Backup: Instant EN/TR toggle and JSON import/export for settings.
• 📜 100% Free & Open Source (GPL-3.0): No store fees, no tracking, pure Vanilla JS.

🔗 GitHub Repo: [https://github.com/YigitOnline/arc-style-side-panel](https://github.com/YigitOnline/arc-style-side-panel)

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback! Feel free to check out the repo or submit PRs!

When I try and save as a pdf from google sheets, I cannot rename the file in the text box. I'm on macos27. Not sure of its a OS thing or ARC itself

Anyone experiencing this?

I love this browser but it's no longer maintained. So many of the nice features are broken, like the github live folders for example, and more will keep breaking. I tried other browsers but this is the one. I've seen lots of people do these black box rewriting of software like photoshop recently and maybe we could do this and make it a community project.

We would still have the drm issue tho

I was trying to file a ticket because folders aren't expanding when one pinned tab within it is open. I have to close the tab to expand the whole folder.

Archie told me to copy and paste the troubleshooting data and then it just said it couldn't do anything.

Anyone else experience either problem?

Did anyone tried it?

Hey everyone! I built an extension to mimic the copy URL feature from Arc. I've been missing it ever since I moved on from this browser. Sharing it here in case anyone else was having the same trouble.

I used Arc every since it came out and ⌘⇧C to copy the current URL became pure muscle memory. After moving to another browser I kept hitting it and nothing happened, and on Chrome it actually opens the DevTools element picker instead.

Everything I found in the store was a bigger product than I wanted, content scripts running on every page, etc. So I built the one thing I was missing.

Press ⌘⇧C and the URL gets copied exactly as it is in the address bar, query params and all, with a small "Link copied" pill that fades out.

A couple of things I added since the first version:

- an optional second shortcut that copies a Markdown link (title + URL), unbound by default
- a checkmark instead of the text pill if you want it quieter
- it works on chrome:// protected pages and the new tab page, you just get a ✓ on the toolbar icon there

It's free, open source (MIT), no account, no tracking. No host permissions either, it only touches the tab you press the shortcut on, so nothing sits in your pages in the background.

It's here if you want to get it!
Chrome Web Store

Source Code: https://github.com/akincan-kilic/copy-url-shortcut

What other small Arc things do you still reach for in your new browser?

hello everyone, I've been using Arc Search ever since it came out and I still love it. But lately it has felt buggy, syncing doesn't work as it used to and i know its been abandoned like Arc. Also the design started to feel a bit dated especially with everyone adopting liquid glass. I've been avoiding going back to safari, I find it very crowded and complex and haven't found a real alternative.

So I started building my own and its called Lens. I wanted to bring the best from Safari, Arc Search and Arc Desktop. TestFlight Link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/5jr4KsAm

1. Functionality and simplicity of Arc Search:
   1. search focused
   2. auto show keyboard
   3. auto archive tabs
   4. clean/simple UI
   5. light and fast.
2. The nativeness of Safari:
   1. native Liquid glass design
   2. tab gestures like swiping, pinching etc.
   3. built-in native translation without relying on Google.
   4. built-in native Reader
   5. handoff
   6. iCloud sync
3. Features from Arc Desktop no one is doing on mobile but are needed:
   1. Pinned tabs in a grid. Unlike Arc Search where pinned items takes up valuable screen space, in Lens they look like Arc and you can fit up to 5 per row.
   2. Proper Zap!/Hide elements. hidden items stay hidden and you can select to hide anything big or small.
   3. Peek links. tap and hold preview links but scrollable!
   4. Mobile web inspector and more dev and designer tools like quickly find font names and hex colors.
4. Extras
   1. Very private tabs with FaceID lock
   2. built in ad/tracker/cookie blockers
   3. Forget Website: quickly delete all data for a website.
   4. smart buttons that only appear when needed like translation, reader and video controls.
   5. mini player for audio/video that follows you on other tabs
   6. 0 data collected. the browser is as privacy focused as possible by default. (this is an area i really want to focus so would love your suggestions)
   7. waiting for Apple to approve so it can be set as default browser and work with passkeys etc..
   8. mac menu bar companion for open tabs.

Changelog: https://apps.angelakismax.com/lens/changelog/

Im very excited to share the first TestFlight with you here. I'm doing this out of passion, not to make money, I want all your suggestions and feedback to make this a great iOS browser for all Arc lovers <3

Hey everyone,

I was using the Capture in Portrait Mode tool in Arc's Developer Mode (the tool accessed via the icon in Developer Mode or Cmd + T -> Capture in Portrait Mode).

According to guides online (like this AllThingsHow article), the pop-up used to feature an option/toggle to use your actual Desktop Wallpaper as the background behind the captured window. (used that months before and now its not there)ow, when I open the tool, there's only a single multi-tone gradient color slider at the bottom, and the option to use the desktop background is gone.

• Is anyone else missing this feature?
• Was this officially removed in a recent update, or is it a bug/permission issue on macOS?

Would appreciate any insight!