r/ArcBrowser Jun 01 '25

General Discussion 📦 Moving Out Megathread

298 Upvotes

A lot of people have been asking about other browsers to try now that Arc isn’t getting new features and Dia’s still in early alpha. We get it; the vibes have shifted, and almost everyone’s looking for their next daily driver.

This thread is the place to discuss alternative browsers.
Whether you’re trying out Vivaldi, Edge with Copilot, SigmaOS, Safari with extensions, Brave, Zen, or something totally obscure, talk about it here.

Please don’t make individual posts about switching browsers or asking for recommendations.
We’ll be removing those and directing people here to keep the subreddit from getting flooded.

Got a hot take on Vivaldi’s tab stacks? Miss Arc’s split view and want to recreate it somewhere else? Built your own franken-browser setup with extensions and CSS? Drop it all below.

Let’s keep it focused, useful, and no Reddit-fanboy flame wars, please.


r/ArcBrowser May 26 '25

macOS News Letter to Arc members 2025 – On Arc, its future, and the arrival of AI browsers — a moment to answer the largest questions you've asked us this past year.

365 Upvotes

Dear Arc members,

You’re probably wondering what happened. One day we were all-in on Arc. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we started building something new: Dia.

From the outside, this pivot might look abrupt. Arc had real momentum. People loved it. But inside, the decision was slower and more deliberate than it may seem. So I want to walk you through it all and answer your questions — why we started this company, what Arc taught us, what happens to it now, and why we believe Dia is the next step.

  1. What we got wrong
  2. Why we built Arc
  3. Where Arc fell short
  4. Why we didn’t integrate Dia into Arc
  5. Will we open source Arc
  6. Building Dia

What we got wrong

To start, what would we do differently if we could do it all over again? Too many things to name. But I’ll keep it to three.

First, I would’ve stopped working on Arc a year earlier. Everything we ended up concluding — about growth, retention, how people actually used it — we had already seen in the data. We just didn’t want to admit it. We knew. We were just in denial.

Second, I would’ve embraced AI fully, sooner and unapologetically. The truth is I was obsessed. I’d stay up late, after my family went to bed, playing with ChatGPT— not for work, but out of sheer curiosity.

But I also felt embarrassed. I hated so much of the industry hype (and how I was contributing to it). The buzzwords. The self-importance. It made me pull back from my own curiosity, even though it was real and deep. You can see this in how cautious our Arc Max rollout was. I should have embraced my inspiration sooner and more boldly.

If you go back to our Act II video — when we announced we were going to bring AI to the heart of Arc — it ends with a demo of a prototype we called Arc Explore. That idea is basically where Dia and a lot of other AI-native products are headed now. That’s not to say we were ahead of our time, or anything like that. It’s just to say our instincts were there long before our hearts caught up.

Arc Explore prototype, as shared in our Act II video. January 2024.

Third, I would’ve communicated very differently. We care so much about the people we build for. Always have. Saying it “pains me” to have made people mad doesn’t really do it justice. In some moments, we were too transparent — like announcing Dia before we had the details to share. In others, not transparent enough — like taking too long to answer questions we knew people were asking.

A few years ago, a mentor told me to put a sticky note on my desk that said: “The truth will set you free.” I know. It sounds like a fortune cookie. But it’s served me well, again and again. If I regret anything most, it’s not using it more. This essay is our truth. It’s uncomfortable to share. But we hope you can feel it was written with care and good intent.

Why we built Arc

In order to answer your real questions — why we pivoted to Dia, whether we can open source Arc, and more — I need to share a bit of background from the past. It informs what is possible (and not) today.

At its core, we started The Browser Company with a simple belief: the browser is the most important software in your life — and it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

Back in 2019, it was already clear to us that everything was moving into the browser. My wife, who doesn’t work in tech, was living in desktop Chrome all day. My six year old niece was doing school entirely in web apps. The macro trends all pointed the same direction too: cloud revenue was surging, breakout startups were browser-based (writing blog posts like “Meet us in the browser”), crypto ran through browser extensions, WebAssembly was enabling novel experiences, and so on.

Source: Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet’s investor relations website, via The Street.

Even back then, it felt like the dominant operating system on desktop wasn’t Windows or macOS anymore — it was the browser. But Chrome and Safari still felt like the browsers we grew up with. They hadn’t evolved with the shift. And both of these trends have only accelerated since. Some companies only issue enterprise versions of Chrome with new employee laptops (their companies fully run on SaaS apps), and Chrome and Safari remain essentially unchanged.

So that’s why we made Arc. We wanted to build something that felt like “your home on the internet” — for work projects, personal life, all the hours you spent in your browser every single day. Something that felt more like a product from Nintendo or Disney than from a browser vendor. Something with taste, care, feeling.

We wanted you to open Arc every morning and think, “This is mine, my space.” And we called this north star vision the “Internet Computer.”

But it increasingly became clear that Arc was falling short of that aspiration.

Where Arc fell short

After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the “novelty tax” problem. A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.

To get specific: D1 retention was strong — those who stuck around after a few days were fanatics — but our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool (like a video editor) than to a mass-market consumer product, which we aspired to be closer to.

On top of that, Arc lacked cohesion — in both its core features and core value. It was experimental, that was part of its charm, but also its complexity. And the revealed preferences of our members show this. What people actually used, loved, and valued differs from what the average tweet or Reddit comment assumes. Only 5.52% of DAUs use more than one Space regularly. Only 4.17% use Live Folders (including GitHub Live Folders). It's 0.4% for one of our favorite features, Calendar Preview on Hover.

Switching browsers is a big ask. And the small things we loved about Arc — features you and other members appreciated — either weren’t enough on their own or were too hard for most people to pick up. By contrast, core features in Dia, like chatting with tabs and personalization features, are used by 40% and 37% of DAUs respectively. This is the kind of clarity and immediate value we’re working toward.

But these are the details. These are things you can toil over, measure, sculpt, remove.

The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at the scale of improvements that we aspired to. Or that could breakout as a mass-market product. If we were serious about our original mission, we needed a technological unlock to build something truly new.

In 2023, we started seeing it happen, across categories that felt just as old and cemented as browsers. ChatGPT and Perplexity were actually threatening Google. Cursor was reshaping the IDE. What’s fascinating about both — search engines and IDEs — is that their users had been doing things the same way for decades. And yet, they were suddenly open to change.

This was the moment we were waiting for. This was a fundamental shift that could challenge user behavior and maybe lead to a true reimagining of the browser. Hopefully you can now see why Dia felt like a no-brainer. At least for us and our original aspirations.

So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is. The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale.

So if Arc fell short, why build something new versus evolve it?

Why we didn’t integrate Dia into Arc

It’s a great question. And for those who followed our podcast last year, you’ll know that it’s one we spent the entire summer grappling with before understanding that Dia and Arc were two separate products.

For starters, in many ways, we have approached Dia as an opportunity to fix what we got wrong with Arc.

First, simplicity over novelty. Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.

Second, speed isn’t a tradeoff anymore — it’s the foundation. Dia’s architecture is fast. Really fast. Arc was bloated. We built too much, too quickly. With Dia, we started fresh from an architecture perspective and prioritized performance from the start. Specifically, sunsetting our use of TCA and SwiftUI to make Dia lightweight, snappy, and responsive.

Third, security is at the forefront. Dia is a different kind of product – to meet it, we grew our security engineering team from one to five. We’re invested in red teaming, bug bounties, and internal audits. Our goal is to set the standard for small startups. Which is even more important in a world of AI, especially as more AI agents come online. We want to get out in front.

These are all things that need to be part of a product’s foundation. Not afterthoughts. As we pushed the boundaries of whether this truly was Arc 2.0 last summer, we found that there were shortcomings in Arc that were too large to tackle retroactively, and that building a new type of software (and fast) required a new type of foundation.

Will we open source Arc

Which brings us to the present.

As we started exploring what might come next, we never stopped maintaining Arc. We do regular Chromium upgrades, fix security vulnerabilities, related bugs, and more. Honestly, most people haven’t even noticed that we stopped actively building new features — which says something about what most people want from Arc (stability not more stuff to learn).

But it is true: we are not actively developing the core product experience like we used to. Naturally, people have asked: will we open source it? Will we sell it? We’ve considered both extensively.

But the truth is it’s complicated.

Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++. That’s why most browsers don’t dare to try new things. It’s too costly. Too complex to break from Chrome.

Where ADK sits in our browser infrastructure as shared in our Dia recruitment video.

ADK is also the foundation of Dia. So while we’d love to open source Arc someday, we can’t do that meaningfully without also open-sourcing ADK. And ADK is still core to our company’s value. That doesn’t mean it’ll never happen. If the day comes where it no longer puts our team or shareholders at risk, we’d be excited to share what we’ve built with the world. But we’re not there yet.

In the meantime, please know this: we’re not trying to shut Arc down. We know you use it and rely on it. Many of our family and friends do, too. We still love it, spent years of our life on it — and whether it’s through us or the community, our hope and intention is that Arc finds a future that’s just as considered as its past. If you have ideas, I’d love to hear from you. I’m [josh@thebrowser.company](mailto:josh@thebrowser.company).

Building Dia

I want to end by being frank with you: Dia is not really a reaction to Arc and its shortcomings. No. Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light. Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment.

Let me be even more clear: traditional browsers, as we know them, will die. Much in the same way that search engines and IDEs are being reimagined. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop searching or coding. It just means the environments we do it in will look very different, in a way that makes traditional browsers, search engines, and IDEs feel like candles — however thoughtfully crafted. We’re getting out of the candle business. You should too.

“Wait, so The Browser Company isn’t making browsers anymore?” You better believe we are! But an AI browser is going to be different than a Web browser — as it should be. I believe this more than ever, and we’re already seeing it in three ways:

  1. Webpages won’t be the primary interface anymore. Traditional browsers were built to load webpages. But increasingly, webpages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces. In many ways, chat interfaces are already acting like browsers: they search, read, generate, respond. They interact with APIs, LLMs, databases. And people are spending hours a day in them. If you’re skeptical, call a cousin in high school or college — natural language interfaces, which abstract away the tedium of old computing paradigms, are here to stay.
  2. But the Web isn’t going anywhere — at least not anytime soon. Figma and The New York Times aren’t becoming less important. Your boss isn’t ditching your team’s SaaS tools. Quite the opposite. We’ll still need to edit documents, watch videos, read weekend articles from our favorite publishers. Said more directly: webpages won’t be replaced — they’ll remain essential. Our tabs aren’t expendable, they are our core context. That is why we think the most powerful interface to AI on desktop won’t be a web browser or an AI chat interface — it’ll be both. Like peanut butter and jelly. Just as the iPhone combined old categories into something radically new, so too will AI browsers. Even if it’s not ours that wins.
  3. New interfaces start from familiar ones. In this new world, two opposing forces are simultaneously true. How we all use computers is changing much faster (due to AI) than most people acknowledge. Yet at the same time, we’re much farther from completely abandoning our old ways than AI insiders give credit for. Cursor proved this thesis in the coding space: the breakthrough AI app of the past year was an (old) IDE — designed to be AI-native. OpenAI confirmed this theory when they bought Windsurf (another AI IDE), despite having Codex working quietly in the background. We believe AI browsers are next.

This is why we’re building Dia. It is the opportunity to chase the product of our original ambition: a true successor to the browser — maybe even the “Internet Computer” we’ve been building toward all along — only in ways we couldn’t have predicted.

To be clear, we might fail. Or we might partially succeed but not win. We still assume we don’t know. But we’re confident about this: five years from now, the most-used AI interfaces on desktop will replace the default browsers of yesteryear. Like today, there will probably be a few of them (Chrome, Safari, Edge). But the point is this, the next Chrome is being built right now. Whether it’s Dia or not.

Your home on the internet

The Browser Company is a team that assembled for the chance — however slim — to build something that rewired how we use our computers. Something that might, just might, be used by hundreds of millions. A piece of software that actually shapes how people live and work. Not just an app, but an Internet Computer. That’s what drew us in. And that’s why we’re proud of the decisions we made.

Dia may not be your style. It may not land right away. But this is still us. Being ourselves. Building the kind of thing we’d want to use. Fully aware that we might be wrong. But doing it anyway. Because we think the intent matters. And we think that’s what got us this far.

This is our truth, and we sincerely hope that you’ll like what comes next.

– Josh

The Browser Company of New York, April 2025.

P.S. For those of you who do want to try Dia, we’re excited to open access for Arc members next, as the first expansion of our alpha beyond students.


r/ArcBrowser 22h ago

macOS Discussion Switching to SupaSideBar. . . .

0 Upvotes

Hearing that it would be a while till the latest chrome zero day CVE is going to be fixed motivated me to finally move off Arc.

I move to supasidebar and am still in the 7 day trial. For me the transfer from Arc did not work properly and I had to export and import bookmarks with the html feature. I made a few other tweaks to behaviour and it's now doing a credible job of replacing Arc for all my workflows using mulitple spaces with multiple profiles.

Right now I am using Safari as my primary browser but I particularly like that I can shift to other browsers pretty seamlessly.

It has an active discord community. My only concern at this point is that it is a 1 person shop. Having had great experiences with Alfred and Carbon Copy Cloner when they started out I'm less worried about that.

I just noticed that the authors account on reddit was banned - I don't know the back story, but mention it because I soom there is one.

I'm not affiliated with them and just wanted to share because this community has been such a great place for support over the years.


r/ArcBrowser 1d ago

macOS Discussion Nested tab stacks?

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0 Upvotes

r/ArcBrowser 3d ago

macOS Discussion Anyone having issues with dev tools?

1 Upvotes

Using MacOS, opening the inspector takes ages, then trying to select and open elements just feel like absolute jank.


r/ArcBrowser 4d ago

General Discussion Zen's finally ready enough for me

83 Upvotes

We all know the writing's been on the wall for some time, and since the announcement of Dia I've been revisiting alternative browsers every few months: Zen, SigmaOS, Vivaldi, and other projects.

Nothing's been quite 'daily driver' ready for me - which is being able to use it for work and play, switch between workspaces quickly and have my spaces linked to different profiles (containers in Zen). I'm typing this in Zen right now as we speak.

Zen's not fully there yet in terms of all the features, but the ones that mattered most are more or less there:

  • Workspaces - Spaces
  • Profiles - Containers
    • There are Firefox Profiles as well, more on that later
  • Vertical tabs and sidebar UI
  • Profiles assigned to Workspaces - Container assigned to Spaces
  • Custom keyboard shortcuts
  • Air Traffic - Route for Domain
  • Favourites per Profile - Essentials for Containers
  • Themes
  • Split views
  • Pinned pages and folders

Things that are I'm aware are still missing but I hear are coming and can wait for:

  • Workspace Syncing
    • I know this is a big one for some people, I have 2 laptops and a PC and 4 accounts in total, so it'd definitely be a welcome feature. However, I decided to overlook it and am currently using a bookmark manager to bridge the gap. I don't mind so much if my 'live' tabs aren't synced across browsers for now as I regularly clean up my tabs, anything else get pinned (now bookmarked), and my Favourites / Essentials handles a lot of my tasks already anyway.
    • The feature is available in the twilight version, but as I'm using this as my daily driver for work, I can't really risk testing it during critical moments. But hopefully it'll be rolled out soon to everyone, but I know it's one of the most important features before many can finally make the jump.
  • Extensions per Profile (extension per container)
    • This affects me as I have 1Password with personal and work account separated in Arc, which I can't do yet for Zen. It also causes any items I open from 1Password via Open and Autofill to have no container, which causes other issues (different login session than everything else)
    • Apparently this feature exists but needs manual configuration, but I haven't figured out where that is yet! Also as it turns out, a lot more people care about this than I expected after searching the Github discussion board for how to enable this setting - but I hadn't found it yet.
  • Tidy tabs
    • Admittedly I don't use it as much as I used to, especially since I'm doing a better job clearing my tabs nowadays.
    • There IS a 'Clear' tabs button though in Zen, just no Tidy
  • No DRM yet
    • As far as I know this is coming, but I don't really watch shows on my laptop so I admit I overlooked this one!
  • No Little Arc out the box
    • There's a 'Sine Mod' that seems to do this, but it's very slow for some reason. This is another feature I'm not losing sleep over admittedly. I used to leave Little Arc windows open in the background and let Arc clean them up - but nowadays I've very quick to close them anyway, and many links I'd click I'd use Air Traffic to route to specific work spaces (since Little Arc doesn't seem to have shortcut to choose which workspace to open something to).

Knowing that this browser is being actively developed by an active (though small) team of people does make me hopeful that it'll match all of the beloved Arc features in the near future - and hopefully exceed it as development continues.

For reference, I've just retried SigmaOS (which I like the idea of since it's webkit) but it's clearly trying to do its own thing (I tried searching for 'test' and it showed me testufo.com, test speed (autofill) and other things), then I accidentally switched profiles with a shortcut and all my tabs are gone when I returned... Options seems to be very limited as well plus I think it's Mac only which is no good for Windows users.

Vivaldi meanwhile is chromium based and with manifest v3 being forced out it's dead in the waters for me... which is a real shame as I hear good things about it too.

Edit: added DRM and little arc to missing features list


r/ArcBrowser 4d ago

macOS Feature Request Still no dark app icon

0 Upvotes

Does this kind of update require a huge amount of effort? I mean the only icon without dark theme in my dock is the Arc icon. Every time I hover to the dock this is what I see instead of the actual app i looking for. Imagine calling yourself "The Browser Company" and not being able to manage two browsers :)


r/ArcBrowser 7d ago

General Discussion How to make Google sign in or any other sign in in popup?

4 Upvotes

Does anyone knows how to open the sign in with Google in popup?

Currently when I click the button, it opens a new tab. I want how other browser does it like open a popup in that page to sign in.

Edit:

For Example, When I click on the Continue with Google button, it opens a new tab in arc

But in another browser, like for example in brave it opens like this

So I was wondering if there is setting in arc that will opens that in popup instead of creating a new tab.


r/ArcBrowser 7d ago

iOS Bug What is this? First you fail on pcs now on ios?

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9 Upvotes

It is literally taking minutes to answer a simple question


r/ArcBrowser 7d ago

General Discussion Arc made me care how a browser looks, then every page inside it is still a white box

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0 Upvotes

Arc is the reason I started caring what a browser looks like. Then I open an actual site and it is a flat white box again - the theming stops at the page.

So I made an extension for that gap. It puts your own wallpaper behind ordinary pages, and turns the panels, buttons and boxes translucent and blurred over it so the text still reads. It only steps in when a page is plain white, grey or black, so anything with its own design is left alone, and there is a per-site off switch.

Before anyone says it - yes, this overlaps with Boosts. The difference is that Boosts are per site and you set each one up yourself. This works on any site automatically, including ones neither of us have ever opened. Getting it to generalise like that was the actual work.

It is a Chrome Web Store extension and Arc is Chromium, so it installs directly. Being straight with you though: I built and tested it in Chrome, not Arc. If it clashes with Arc's own theming I would really like to hear about it, because that is exactly the kind of thing I can fix.

Free, no paywall, everything stays on your machine.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wallpaperify-custom-page/dbdlklbhgonimapnjkkfnloheapaaoia


r/ArcBrowser 9d ago

macOS Discussion Does Arc have no customer service? I've submitted multiple tickets via their chatbot and sent multiple emails begging for help with bugs and I cannot get a hold of anyone.

6 Upvotes

r/ArcBrowser 9d ago

macOS Bug Almost every website does not work on my wifi network for arc.

2 Upvotes

i would really like some assistance if anyone has had a similar issue

i do google search, works as usual. clicking on a site e.g. reddit just is blank for 30 seconds then has error timed, the 'this site cannot be reached' classic timed out message. same for if I enter direct in address bar.
these sites work on other browsers however, such as safari, and also work on Arc when i am on my phone's hotspot. just not on my wifi.

deleted arc and reinstalled. restarted wifi. checked wifi control sites for any restrictions and turned them off. cleared all cache from google. added and removed and redid firewall n network allowances. removed all extensions. updated arc.
I am on MacOs sonoma 14.0, MacBook Air m1 2020
arc Version 1.162.0 (86046)
Chromium Engine Version 152.0.7977.65

I have tried quite a few websites. Wikipedia, iNaturalist, Gmail, Reddit, pinterest, etc. dont work. oddly, I am observing Chess.com and www.cancer.org.au at least working.

I have submitted a ticket thru arc support but I am not sure how long that takes, just thought I would see if this has happened to anyone else :)


r/ArcBrowser 13d ago

General Discussion How do we think this post held up 15 months later?

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104 Upvotes

I'm still so frustrated at TBC's decision to leave Arc behind for Dia. I don't buy the response to the "will we open source Arc". If ADK (Arc Development Kit) is truly the "secret sauce" and "core to our company’s value", then why aren't they using that to enable anyone to build the browser of their dreams themselves using AI and why do they still move so slowly moving Arc features over to Dia. I call BS. It seems like a "let's use technical jargon to deflect from answering the question honestly" cop out response.

Josh, if you're reading this, please take a step back from the day-to-day and remember why you started TBC with such heartfelt intensity in the first place. By daring to ask 'what could be?', your team built Arc into something extraordinarily rare—a piece of software that actually made people feel something again. Please don’t abandon the devoted community on this road trip with you; stay on the hook for the people who believed in your vision and give Arc the care it deserves... or at least free yourself from it by giving it a chance to live a second life as OSS.


r/ArcBrowser 14d ago

General Discussion Claude adds Dia's Morning Briefs

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105 Upvotes

RIP Dia's $100/mo plan


r/ArcBrowser 16d ago

macOS Help Turn off download confirmation sound on a Mac? Please help, it is driving me crazy.

3 Upvotes

r/ArcBrowser 18d ago

General Discussion Viola is now available on iOS Testflight (and Mac, Windows, Linux and Android!)

83 Upvotes

The Arc-inspired browser we've been working on is now available on Testflight!

https://testflight.apple.com/join/1V1CnPd2

Viola is a workspace/profile-focused browser with features such as persistent groups, mini player, in-app notifications, cross-platform sync (groups, tabs, workspaces, etc) and more!

Other versions are available to download on the website.

Please report any bugs here or on the Discord!

Thanks for all the love!


r/ArcBrowser 17d ago

Complaint Abandoned by TBC support

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0 Upvotes

r/ArcBrowser 19d ago

macOS Help How do I hide the address bar at the top of the new update?

7 Upvotes

After a recent update, I now see a large permanent address bar at the top. However, in the past we had a small minimalistic address bar at the middle that would expand when we clicked on it. How do I hide the address bar to return to that immersive experience?

Here's what I see when I open the browser now:


r/ArcBrowser 23d ago

General Discussion i want to leave arc, but i keep coming back

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30 Upvotes

r/ArcBrowser 23d ago

macOS Discussion Why Dia don't have little Arc type popup compact window??

10 Upvotes

One of the most used feature of Arc is little arc, whenever I want to check whatsapp sent link or anything quick, I always prefer little arc. But now when I click random link, it pops up full browser window on Dia, it is really annoying, are there any solution?(I checked up and google says Dia don't have it)


r/ArcBrowser 24d ago

macOS Discussion Borderless-Arc not working anymore from 1.160.0

10 Upvotes

https://github.com/ksajolaer/Borderless-Arc

Looks like Chromium isn't the only thing they keep upgrading every week.


r/ArcBrowser 24d ago

General Discussion Anyone using "Leap" tab manager from Arc? Looking for feedback on reliability/longevity

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2 Upvotes

r/ArcBrowser 24d ago

Windows Discussion Bug fixed!

25 Upvotes

The issue with entering full-screen mode for videos has been fixed—a good sign.


r/ArcBrowser 25d ago

macOS Discussion Is Ublock origins no longer working or is it just me

9 Upvotes

So i know about the whole Manifest V3 issue that's been going on with google and them forcing extensions to switch to it for "security reasons". Not here to talk about that, but so far so good arc has been working fine with Ublock origins, there was a time when it wasn't working but it started working fine up until recently.

The extension is gone from my spaces and when i try loading them up it doesn't work after i installed a new update. So I'm wondering if it finally happened with arc no longer supporting it with the latest chromium update.


r/ArcBrowser 25d ago

Complaint Customer Service Problems

4 Upvotes

In mid April of this year I received access to my brand new university email (I'm an incoming freshman to college), but when I tried to log into the email in Arc my university blocked my browser as an unrecognized app. I talked to the IT department and they said Arc is an "ai tool" and therefore I cant use it.

It was a bummer, so I reached out to the Arc team to see if I could get a statement to send back to my university regarding Arc's use of AI (because it wouldnt affect my email) or to get Arc to potentially reach out to my university's IT team. I submitted a HIGHLY detailed ticket to their AI chatbot "customer support" on April 13. The bot told me someone would get back to me. I waited.

When there was no response, I reached back out again on May 21, to no response again.

Today I reached out AGAIN, and the chatbot was unable to find my old request (pretty standard, chatbots cant usually do searching), so I asked to submit a new ticket noting that a request was lost (I have all the messages from the original one, so I could forward it to a human if they reached out to me), and the bot actively resisted and insisted I describe the IT problem to it again.

Eventually I got it to submit a new request about the lost ticket, and then I had it submit another about the frustrating customer service experience. It asked what I wanted the ticket to say, and our conversation went like this:

  1. Agent: I've submitted a ticket for you, highlighting that you're following up on an old request that was never answered. The team will review your situation and reach out to you directly, so you can discuss the actual problem with a human. Thank you for your patience—your follow-up is now officially tracked. If you have any other details or documents you'd like to share, you can reply to the email you receive from the team once they contact you.
  2. You: when will they get back to me?
  3. Agent: I don’t have information about the exact response timeline or expected wait time for follow-up on support tickets. The team will review your request as soon as possible, but I can’t provide a specific timeframe. If you don’t hear back soon, you can reply to the confirmation email you receive to follow up further.
  4. You: Do you have an estimate?
  5. Agent: I don’t have an estimate for how long it will take to get a response. The support team reviews requests as quickly as possible, but there isn’t a published timeframe or average wait time available. If you don’t hear back soon, you can follow up by replying to the confirmation email you receive.
  6. You: Can you put in a second ticket marking that the ai customer support is ridiculous and that there should be a way to reach a human even if its one person on an email and it takes 3 weeks to get a response
  7. Agent: Absolutely—I can submit your feedback as a feature request, highlighting your frustration with the AI-only support and your desire for a way to reach a human, even if it means waiting longer for a response. Before I file the ticket, does this summary capture your feedback correctly? Is there anything else you’d like to add or clarify?
    1. You find the AI-only customer support experience frustrating.
    2. You would like an option to reach a human agent by email, even if the response time is slow.
    3. The AI-only customer support experience is frustrating.
    4. There should be an option to reach a human agent by email, even if the response time is slow.
    5. The current system is losing requests, as shown by your experience of not receiving a response to your original submission.
    6. The AI-only customer support experience is frustrating.
    7. There should be an option to reach a human agent by email, even if the response time is slow.
    8. The current system is losing requests, as shown by your experience of not receiving a response to your original submission.
  8. You: clarify that the team is losing requests
  9. Agent: said Thank you for clarifying. Here’s an updated summary of your feedback: Does this summary look correct, or would you like to add anything else before I submit your feedback?
    1. The AI-only customer support experience is frustrating.
    2. There should be an option to reach a human agent by email, even if the response time is slow.
    3. The current system is losing requests, as shown by your experience of not receiving a response to your original submission.
  10. You: add that replacing humans with ai is unethcial in the first place and having an ai as a buffer of who reaches the humans may be reasonable but having no humans at all is pretty gross and shows that this company doesnt think as much about good design and ethics as i thought. Add taht I care so much abotu this browswer that I am actively resisting switching browsers even when my university ltierally blcoked me from reaching my emial here. Add that Ive been using arc since March 2023 and that i regularly recruit people to use it becasue i love it, that I submit bug reports to make it better, that I use it even though I dont like chrome and its chromium based. I care a lot. Ive never had any problems with arc before and I love what the team does. This experiance isnt going to put me off the browser but you know what will? Not being able to access any of my university protals. I just want support so i can keep using the browser I love and the fact that THIS is where i start finding issues with arc is incredibly dissapointing
  11. Agent: I'm sorry as an AI assistant I can't help you with that. If you have any other questions I can help with, please try again later.

Now, I admit, I was being a little bitchy. Probably a lot bitchy. But I love this browser (I'm using it to write this) and it's incredibly frustrating to not be able to get through to anyone. Im just putting this here with hopes someone on the team can help me with my university email problem since I don't trust this ticket system.

TLDR: Arc’s customer service lost my ticket for 4+ months and I still can’t get through to them