Goodbye Arc

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my switch to Arc on my macOS workstation. It has served me well. But then BCNY made the biggest mistake: they alienated their early adopters.

For over two years, Arc members did all sorts of cool things with it, shared it with the world, suggested interesting features and were generally a fun crowd to hang out with. I convinced about half a dozen people at work to try it out and ditch Chrome. This is only possible when a product is innovative, easy and generally fun. Arc nailed all of it.

But then the weekly goodies screeched to a halt. They focused their entire team on their newest endeavour: an AI browser called Dia. Arc was relegated to maintenance mode, where the only release notes are Chromium updates or the occasional security patch. The fun vibe was gone.

Even on the technical front, there wasn’t much to write home about. There were no plans for a Linux version. The Windows version was buggy. The mobile versions were severely lacking in features, and the missing sync on Android was a deal-breaker for me.

And don’t quote me on this, but I’m fairly sure they promised to open source it at some point. That never happened.

To put it simply: the only reason I used it at all was the smooth workflows it enabled with Spaces, Command Palette and Split View. On every other front, it was inferior to the mainstream browsers it was trying to beat.

On the other hand, an few months ago, I came across a Firefox-based browser called Zen, that was trying to implement similar workflows. I tried the alpha, and quickly realised why it was alpha. It needed work.

More recently, I decided to give it another shot. At the time of writing, Zen is in beta, and is visually indistinguishable from Arc. They’re making no effort to hide the fact that it’s a blatant ripoff of Arc.

And you know what? That’s fine.

There are several reasons why it’s a better browser than Arc for me:

• It is open source from day one.
• It is not Chromium. We need less Chromium in the world, not more.
• It syncs with Firefox, which I’ve been using everywhere except my workstation.
• It’s cross-platform, so I can use it on Linux.

Sure, it’s still rough around the edges and some things are not as smooth as they were in Arc, but remember that it’s beta software, and things will only improve going forward.

All in all, it made perfect sense for me to switch to Zen for all my desktops while continuing to use Firefox on mobile.

So this is my message to Arc and BCNY: I am thankful to you for proving that browsers can be fun and innovative instead of a boring set of tabs. I am also disappointed that you didn’t see that vision through and changed directions midway. So you have no right to complain about Zen being a ripoff, because they’re only carrying forward the legacy which you abandoned.