YHK - yet another hacker news clone

A farewell to Arc browser

148 points suhdonghwi 3 hours ago 113 comments

ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago | parent

Previously in May 2025:

Letter to Arc Members 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102709

an0malous 2 hours ago | parent

Never trust a product that takes VC funding. Take advantage of the subsidized prices but have your backup ready.

inhumantsar 2 hours ago | parent

what was Arc's business model even?

Almondsetat 2 hours ago | parent

uber for browsing the web

timpera 2 hours ago | parent

It was based on a future "Arc for Teams" offering and a "Boosts" (= browsing personalizations) marketplace: https://youtu.be/eVda3zFLlhc?si=a7avuRAqq2KlvpG5&t=338

colesantiago 2 hours ago | parent

> 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.

vinyl7 2 hours ago | parent

How about by making money like businesses used to do in the olden days

colesantiago 2 hours ago | parent

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.

c-hendricks 1 hour ago | parent

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?

colesantiago 1 hour ago | parent

Support and donate regularly to OSS or vibe code your own!

Unless of course you're Stripe (which is VC funded) we still need an OSS version of Stripe.

Lalabadie 2 hours ago | parent

Sometimes I think I exaggerate how far into their own bubble the YC comments are.

sandeepkd 2 hours ago | parent

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.

allenleee 2 hours ago | parent

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...

pphysch 2 hours ago | parent

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.

pessimizer 2 hours ago | parent

> 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.

pphysch 2 hours ago | parent

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).

slipwalker 2 hours ago | parent

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.

SomeonesAccount 2 hours ago | parent

yeah that would be the absolute best possible thing for them to do

swyx 1 hour ago | parent

yes please ^ browser company engs!

tinyhouse 2 hours ago | parent

Is this just the product Arc or the entire company? (The Browser Company)

juicypeach 2 hours ago | parent

Just Arc browser. They still have Dia.

joelboersma 2 hours ago | parent

The Browser Company still exists developing Dia, after being acquired by Atlassian a while ago

zachwdc 2 hours ago | parent

Arc users, what are you moving to?

jotato 2 hours ago | parent

I moved to the Helium browser several months ago.

juicypeach 2 hours ago | parent

Same. I love it.

brzz 2 hours ago | parent

n'thed

mjazwiecki 2 hours ago | parent

maybe good time to reverse engineer it using AI and then open source it?

deppep 2 hours ago | parent

once again, back to firefox

Ardakilic 2 hours ago | parent

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.

knes 2 hours ago | parent

I've been on Helium for some time. it's great (for now)

uriahlight 2 hours ago | parent

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.

jaffa2 2 hours ago | parent

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

mosselman 2 hours ago | parent

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.

ValentineC 1 hour ago | parent

How are you handling upstream updates?

mosselman 1 hour ago | parent

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.

rglover 1 hour ago | parent

> Nobody but me has it and it is great!

The zen of this position is severely underrated.

odo1242 2 hours ago | parent

I'm on Zen Browser

Ardakilic 2 hours ago | parent

Helium browser. Never looked back.

herunan 25 minutes ago | parent

Moved to Zen as soon as I noticed Arc went on maintenance mode. Never looked back.

jamie_ca 2 hours ago | parent

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...

trehans 2 hours ago | parent

I looked at this a while back but couldn't figure out how to migrate bookmarks from Arc to Zen. Is that possible now?

ahurmazda 2 hours ago | parent

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).

lnenad 2 hours ago | parent

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.

paufernandez 2 hours ago | parent

Oh! Nice surprise, switched instantly! Love it!

mostlysimilar 2 hours ago | parent

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Firefox have all those features? Why put third party intermediary between you and the source?

ciefa 2 hours ago | parent

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)

accidc 19 minutes ago | parent

Could you list a couple of things you find wierd? Wondering if its worth switching

tethys 2 minutes ago | parent

Not OP, but I am not a fan of the newly introduced library. Exploring my history is bad in Firefox, and this is even worse. It doesn’t show full page titles, so it’s almost impossible to find the right page.

jamie_ca 1 hour ago | parent

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.

summermusic 1 hour ago | parent

+1 for Zen. It's got a lot of Arc's neat UX but without all the AI garbage.

TSiege 1 hour ago | parent

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.

zeendo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

whywhywhywhy 5 minutes ago | parent

The pivot from one new browser to another new ai browser was insanely bad optics and aura loss.

BoxwoodSeed 1 minute ago | parent

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.

shikshake 2 hours ago | parent

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.

jjuel 2 hours ago | parent

So the new browser uses AI to read your tabs? No thanks!

juicypeach 2 hours ago | parent

What makes you think they were not reading your tabs in Arc?

jjuel 2 hours ago | parent

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.

falloon 2 hours ago | parent

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.

jdgoesmarching 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Pfhortune 2 hours ago | parent

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.

swyx 1 hour ago | parent

>As much as Josh is a tool

did you really have to include that? without substantiation this is just a mean offhand side swipe.

Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent

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)

nostrademons 2 hours ago | parent

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?"

JdeBP 2 hours ago | parent

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.)

maccard 2 hours ago | parent

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.

InsideOutSanta 58 minutes ago | parent

Arc was already essentially discontinued in favor of Dia when they were acquired. It only received bugfixes.

drewbeck 2 hours ago | parent

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.

glenstein 1 hour ago | parent

Also it was YACB (yet another chromium browser), as is the successor browser Dia.

oldfuture 1 hour ago | parent

the privacy of this one doesn't look so good tbh https://www.diabrowser.com/privacy

catoc 6 minutes ago | parent

Your IP address, IP address-location data, device ID, the pages you visit using Dia and queries submitted, and other “User Content”.

Indeed, doesn’t look good at all.

jerlam 1 hour ago | parent

I think development was halted on Arc, and Dia was announced before the acquisition.

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

esafak 2 hours ago | parent

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.

arjie 2 hours ago | parent

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.

yeutterg 2 hours ago | parent

Curious about the terminal part of this!

admjs 2 hours ago | parent

As am I

impure 2 hours ago | parent

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.

odo1242 2 hours ago | parent

Zen Browser is what I've been using (https://zen-browser.app/)

drewbeck 2 hours ago | parent

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.

timpera 2 hours ago | parent

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).

nicce 2 hours ago | parent

Is account mandatory? Do I remember correctly that Arc used to have and it was quite blocker.

kvam 1 hour ago | parent

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.

simjnd 2 hours ago | parent

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.

aorth 2 hours ago | parent

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!

lowkey_ 2 hours ago | parent

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.

usrme 1 hour ago | parent

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...

crab_galaxy 1 hour ago | parent

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 ;(

HackerThemAll 1 hour ago | parent

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.

SomeonesAccount 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ghusto 1 hour ago | parent

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.

SomeonesAccount 1 hour ago | parent

Looking forward to Radian browser, it looks like Arc but is made by an individual, not a company

sellmesoap 1 hour ago | parent

Well that arc was shorter then I expected.

28304283409234 1 hour ago | parent

well arctually....

nekooooo 1 hour ago | parent

Dia is terrible. Time for me to swtich to a different browser that has the sidebar tabs.

jhaile 56 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, they have added most of the Arc features into Dia now - the ones I still miss are Peek, Air Traffic Control, and Nested Folders (!?)

kvam 1 hour ago | parent

I will not switch to Dia, however easy they make it. Why?

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

ramon156 1 hour ago | parent

without sounding dense, can anyone tell me why i wouldve even considered trying Arc? just seemed like a hype train with no goal

j45 1 hour ago | parent

It's too bad, this had some nice features.

Hopefully it might get open sourced.

jhaile 55 minutes ago | parent

I've tried switching from Arc to Dia several times over the past year and Dia was always significantly worse. I tried again today after the news.

The main features I miss from Arc are Peek, Air Traffic Control, and Nested Folders.

tuzemec 15 minutes ago | parent

Air Traffic Control is the thing that kept me on Arc.

stevenhubertron 50 minutes ago | parent

Arc was the only good product they had. What a self own. To see a company fall this hard is crazy. It will be studied like Perplexity.

davidd_1004 18 minutes ago | parent

I remember back when they launched a lot of people, myself included, were skeptical of their business model and the CEO told everyone not to worry about it. Turns out they were right lol

app 50 minutes ago | parent

I'll miss Arc but got fed up about 4 months ago and switched to Safari with a combination of SupaSidebar[1] for the spaces/vertical tabs and OpenIn [2] for Air Traffic Control. I'm pretty happy with it!

1 - https://supasidebar.com 2 - https://loshadki.app/openin4/

terabytest 49 minutes ago | parent

Such a braindead move. You go to the Dia product page and it looks exactly the same as Arc. What’s the point? Just keep improving Arc. I know that back when they originally abandoned Arc, Dia looked like a generic Google Chrome clone with AI stapled on, but I cannot imagine what good reason they had at all to give up Arc and burn their entire user base along the way. I’m not a paying user, so I guess they don’t care about me after all.

yamanahlawat 47 minutes ago | parent

should have just open sourced arc instead of sunsetting it. dia feels incomplete.

i really liked tidy, clear, capture screenshots and other shortcuts. it felt a complete browser. maybe dia will eventually reach that stage - but its definitely not there.

aliasxneo 46 minutes ago | parent

Why do I see so many suggestions for Helium? It looks nothing like Arc. What am I missing?

avazhi 40 minutes ago | parent

lol

Lmao even

Encapsulates enshittification in the current era really well, actually.

The lasting memory of these guys is how they refused to listen to their users. It was insane from the beginning how little they cared what their niche demographic even wanted. It got so bad so fast that after trying to get an invite and waiting a few months by the time I got invited it was already clearly a shit show and I didn’t even bother trialling it. The WeWork of browsers.

IneffablePigeon 34 minutes ago | parent

Open source it, cowards

estetlinus 26 minutes ago | parent

Does Dia or Zen have an api I can point Claude Code to? It would be nice to sort tabs via Claude Code, that already has my context. Tried doing it with Firefox, but requires awkward workarounds.

sanderjd 2 minutes ago | parent

I wanted this for awhile, but actually now I kind of like having vanilla Chrome for browser automation only, and a different browser that I actually use.

tech_ken 22 minutes ago | parent

Arc was a beautiful browser to use, but they lost a lot of my trust after that massive security vuln that they shipped as a silly customization feature

pixeljam 16 minutes ago | parent

most interesting footgun ever

jimmydoe 13 minutes ago | parent

Zen is buggy, much less buggy than before but still buggy.

Dia has sidebar tabs now, but it feels half baked, and the AI Chat button is an annoyingly permanent ads.

Nook was interesting for 30sec, but you will soon find out it's just not done.

RIP Arc, there's no match, I'll miss you.