Arc – My first Love
In recent years, I’ve written here repeatedly about the apps I use for my work. Things have changed here and there, but one constant was the browser: Arc – a Chromium-based browser with many clever UI and UX ideas, including vertical tabs. I loved it.
Unfortunately, then came the big AI boom and every software company with venture capital suddenly had to integrate AI. This included the Browser Company, the makers of Arc.
At first, they succeeded surprisingly well. Instead of simply integrating a chatbot, they built in small functionalities like automatic tab organization based on website content.
However, at some point that apparently wasn’t enough anymore and they decided to abandon Arc and instead create a completely new browser. Arc was supposed to be kept alive and supplied with security updates, and that’s been the case to this day, but no new features are being added. Arc is thus on life support, but only minimally so.
Instead, they announced a new project: the AI-first browser Dia. I was disappointed, but at the same time interested and curious, and immediately got myself on the waiting list. Relatively shortly after the public beta started, I received my invitation and could hardly wait to try Dia. The disillusionment came quickly: Dia looks quite sleek, but it lacks tons of functionality that I had grown to love in Arc. Vertical tabs did come after a while, but were implemented rather carelessly and only halfway. In Arc, vertical tabs, work spaces, and many other small features complemented each other into a pretty unique package. Dia was now simply another Chromium browser that integrated an AI chatbot and let me chat with my tabs. Not bad, but overall significantly weaker than Arc. A few weeks ago, it also became public that a monthly subscription of a whopping $20 is to be introduced. And that for a product that’s nowhere near finished.
All of this prompted me to look for a new browser, since I have to assume that Arc will simply be abandoned at some point. Of course, I could also just use Safari. And it’s good to know that I have this fallback option. But Safari is also somewhat boring, and since I’m currently between different projects, I once again have time and opportunity to engage with my tools.
So what then?
The direct competitor – Comet
It was perfect timing when I finally received an invitation for the Comet browser from Perplexity. While it’s also based on Chromium and isn’t a design revelation, it integrates the AI component much better and also has agentic capabilities, so it can actually „operate“ the web for you.
I’ve even used this here and there, but all in all, the technology doesn’t seem mature enough yet, because agentic browsing is primarily often very slow and thus barely realizes any time savings. Moreover, you always have to keep an eye on whether the AI is doing the right thing. Comet could well have remained my browser of choice, but I simply couldn’t get used to the classic design with horizontal tabs anymore, and the fact that you can’t save tab groups, as you actually can in Chrome, I found very unsatisfying.
The surprise candidate – Orion
Very briefly, a surprise solution emerged: Orion. A niche browser based on Firefox and developed by the makers of the Google alternative Kagi. Orion has some clever ideas. Among other things, you can use plugins from both the Firefox and Chrome stores. Design-wise, it also comes very close to Arc with its workspaces and vertical tabs. But you also notice that a small team is behind it, that it’s a young product and not even the company’s main product. The bugs are hard to miss, and many pages weren’t displayed correctly in my (admittedly short) test. What bothered me most, though, was that the plugin for my password manager of choice, Bitwarden, didn’t work. With that, Orion had basically already disqualified itself.
The solution – Zen
After all these experiments, I returned to a browser that I had briefly tested right at the beginning but that was too buggy for me initially: Zen Browser. Zen was explicitly developed as an Arc successor by disappointed Arc enthusiasts and therefore copies Arc’s design as faithfully as possible, but is based on Firefox.
That’s not ideal because the Firefox engine isn’t as stable as Chromium and there are also fewer extensions. Usually, you notice this relatively little though. Moreover, Zen has become much more stable since my first attempt and finally got pinned folders, which are essential for me. Zen isn’t without flaws and is far from being fully developed. Tabs that close themselves after a defined time don’t exist, for example, which I absolutely can’t comprehend. And there are still some unresolved problems in Zen.
All in all, though, Zen is a worthy successor to Arc, and above all, browsing in Zen simply feels good and seamless. My muscle memory works, I don’t have to think, and everything is where I expect it to be after years of using Arc. I don’t have AI integration here, but that’s not a big problem. Either I simply open the websites of ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude directly, or I use the respective apps. Agentic browsing isn’t that advanced yet anyway, so I don’t miss it in my workflow.
Zen thus gives me what they promise: a calmer internet.
