I’ve been using Arc Browser for the past couple of years and have been pretty happy overall. It’s well-designed, stuffed full of design details, and much more minimal than other browsers, and runs on Chromium so I could continue using all my favorite extensions from my Chrome days.
However, a couple of things have happened recently that made me switch browsers.
The Arc Browser roadmap is dead
The Browser Company recently announced that they consider Arc “complete” and that no other features will be added. This came as a surprise to many, considering that they never shipped features originally promised, and they’ve left their Windows browser in a bit of a half-baked, bug-ridden state.
I have a Mac as my main machine and a gaming PC, so cross-platform functionality is something that’s pretty valuable to me.
Manifest 3
There have been some significant architectural changes to Chromium, particularly around how effective ad blockers will be in all future versions of Chromium-based browsers.
Manifest V3 restricts ad blockers by limiting their ability to dynamically inspect web traffic, capping the number of filtering rules they can use, and replacing always-on background processes with temporary ones that can be shut down—forcing developers to find creative workarounds to maintain effectiveness.
I don’t know about you, but using the internet without an ad blocker is absolute torture, and the cat and mouse game of trying to constantly avoid them is not something I’m interested in dealing with.
Enter Zen
Zen is a new, open-source browser built on Firefox instead of Chromium. People like myself coming from Arc will notice a stunning similarity between the two—it’s pretty safe to say that Zen directly borrowed the Arc design language.
It has a left sidebar for your tabs, a minimal view, and multiple work spaces to keep bookmarks separate. It also has a built-in community plugin section, which allows you to further customize things as well.
Overall, it’s definitely not at the same level of polish as Arc, and Firefox feels a bit weird after not using it for so many years, but I’m pretty happy with the switch.
My main gripes so far are not having folders in the sidebar (which is on the roadmap) and proper syncing between Mac and PC. These are small issues in the grand scheme of things, but I’m happy I’ve finally made the change.
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