As Arc winds down, Zen Browser offers an open-source, AI-free alternative

Arc's shutdown leaves users searching

Arc, the browser that rethought tabs and window management, is approaching its official end. According to The Verge, Atlassian acquired the company behind Arc last year and redirected its development effort toward Dia, a browser built even more heavily around AI. Arc loyalists now need somewhere to go, and The Verge's Terrence O'Brien writes that he found his answer in Zen Browser — a switch he made well before Arc's demise.

An Arc-inspired interface, minus the AI

O'Brien is blunt about Zen's inspiration: it takes the interface ideas that made Arc feel fresh and reproduces them almost exactly. That means pinned sites arranged like a launcher, a vertical tab bar along the left edge, separate spaces for keeping different contexts siloed, and mods for restyling the browser's UI. Visually, he says, the two are hard to tell apart.

What Zen removes is everything O'Brien found bloated about Arc — most importantly, the AI. There is no assistant in a sidebar asking to take over tasks, and no concern about a language model being trained on browsing activity. As he puts it, it is just a web browser.

Zen is a free, open-source project maintained by volunteers and supported by donations. It positions itself as privacy-focused, saying it cares about the user's experience rather than their data. O'Brien acknowledges that nothing done online is truly private, but his argument is that with Arc, user data felt embedded in the business plan in a way it is not with a donation-funded open-source project.

Extensions, glance tabs and a floating launcher

Because Zen is built on Firefox, it runs Firefox extensions. Arc could install Chrome extensions, but O'Brien reports — anecdotally — that Zen handles them better. Both browsers have layouts unusual enough that not every extension renders correctly, yet Zen provides more workarounds.

Zen also carries over Arc's focus-oriented conveniences. Links open in a "glance" view, a temporary pop-over tab that suits window shopping or light research, and converting it into a proper tab takes one click. Pressing Command+T or Ctrl+T summons a floating bar where you can open a new tab, switch to an existing one, run a search through your preferred engine, or trigger an extension.

The current trade-offs

Zen is not without gaps. It cannot currently play DRM-protected video, which rules out Netflix, Spotify, HBO, Disney+ and similar services inside the browser. The Zen team is pursuing a Widevine license from Google to fix this; until then, O'Brien simply keeps Chrome available for streaming. Because Zen sits on Firefox, it also inherits Firefox's weak Web MIDI support, which sends him back to Chrome for certain music-related workflows.

He also misses Arc's Boosts, the per-site customization feature. Zen implemented something similar in May, but O'Brien finds it unintuitive, and he has not located an official, easily browsable repository of installable boosts — meaning users mostly adjust individual sites' appearance by hand.

For anyone who tried Zen during its buggy early period, O'Brien says the project has matured considerably since. His bottom line: those who embraced Arc's AI direction will likely prefer Dia, but people who loved Arc's interface while disliking its atmosphere may find that Zen simply fits better.

Why it matters

Arc's shutdown strands a user base that specifically chose a browser for its spatial, sidebar-driven design, and many of those users are web developers who live in a browser all day. Zen offers them a migration path that preserves the interface they learned, while trading a venture-backed product for a volunteer-run, open-source one — a meaningful difference at a moment when commercial browsers are consolidating around AI assistants. Developers evaluating the switch should weigh two practical caveats: extension compatibility depends on Firefox rather than Chrome, and DRM-protected streaming does not work yet. As an open-source project, Zen also gives developers the option to inspect, extend and fix the browser themselves rather than wait on a vendor's roadmap — something Arc users, watching their browser wind down after an acquisition, now understand the value of.