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)
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?"
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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'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...
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?"
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.)
the privacy of this one doesn't look so good tbh https://www.diabrowser.com/privacy
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.
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.
Also it was YACB (yet another chromium browser), as is the successor browser Dia.
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...
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Firefox have all those features? Why put third party intermediary between you and the source?
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)
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.
+1 for Zen. It's got a lot of Arc's neat UX but without all the AI garbage.
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).
Oh! Nice surprise, switched instantly! Love it!
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.
I looked at this a while back but couldn't figure out how to migrate bookmarks from Arc to Zen. Is that possible now?
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.
Dia is a joke.
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).
Is account mandatory? Do I remember correctly that Arc used to have and it was quite blocker.
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.
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.
yeah that would be the absolute best possible thing for them to do
yes please ^ browser company engs!
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.
>As much as Josh is a tool
did you really have to include that? without substantiation this is just a mean offhand side swipe.
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...
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!
Well that arc was shorter then I expected.
well arctually....
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.
Curious about the terminal part of this!
As am I
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.
So the new browser uses AI to read your tabs? No thanks!
What makes you think they were not reading your tabs in Arc?
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.
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.
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.
Zen Browser is what I've been using (https://zen-browser.app/)
Looking forward to Radian browser, it looks like Arc but is made by an individual, not a company
Dia is terrible. Time for me to swtich to a different browser that has the sidebar tabs.
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 ;(
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.
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.
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.
Arc users, what are you moving to?
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.
How are you handling upstream updates?
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.
I moved to the Helium browser several months ago.
Same. I love it.
n'thed
I've been on Helium for some time. it's great (for now)
Helium browser. Never looked back.
I'm on Zen Browser
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
maybe good time to reverse engineer it using AI and then open source it?
once again, back to firefox
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.
Is this just the product Arc or the entire company? (The Browser Company)
The Browser Company still exists developing Dia, after being acquired by Atlassian a while ago
Just Arc browser. They still have Dia.
Previously in May 2025:
Letter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709
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.
Never trust a product that takes VC funding. Take advantage of the subsidized prices but have your backup ready.
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...
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
what was Arc's business model even?
It was based on a future "Arc for Teams" offering and a "Boosts" (= browsing personalizations) marketplace: https://youtu.be/eVda3zFLlhc?si=a7avuRAqq2KlvpG5&t=338
uber for browsing the web
> 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.
Sometimes I think I exaggerate how far into their own bubble the YC comments are.
How about by making money like businesses used to do in the olden days
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.
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?