alt Hacker NewsWriting was on the wall once they pivoted to Dia, I'm pretty happy having switched to Zen (though for a few things that matter, it's Firefox-based not Chrome).
They picked up a lot of cues from Arc - sidebar tabs, pinned vs generic tabs, global bookmarks, spaces...
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Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Firefox have all those features? Why put third party intermediary between you and the source?
Crest (https://crestbrowser.com/) looks like an interesting option. You can use both Chrome and Safari as the backing engine, and its main goal is basically to replicate all of Arc's features. Still feels a bit immature but it already implements a lot of the functionality. I still haven't tried it as a full-time replacement but I just might with this annoucement.
If only Zen was in the repositories of my Linux system, I'd have given it a try. Not a fan of running a browser of all things from outside the repositories.
Are the shortcuts for moving between tabs and spaces good? I can see the appeal of the sidebar and the split view is genuinely cool, but it's features, like glance, feels really cursor heavy. Clicking on a page and then going back to the search results is so fast with a keyboard or track gestures. I want fewer mouse movements not more.
Alas! I made the jump to Zen browser but shitty support for audio share across tabs made work impossible. So back to Chrome (yes, need Google Meet for livelihood).
Zen turned to shit for me in the last month. So many stupid bugs started happening. For example, clicking on exes in the downloads would retrigger the download instead of running the file. Random crashes. I was able to drag the whole window by clicking on random parts of the page (I noticed this as I highlight text during reading). It got very slow. I tried to report these but the button to report would actually redirect to Firefox's feedback page lol.
I switched to Brave, migrated in a few minutes literally and feel much better.
Oh! Nice surprise, switched instantly! Love it!
I looked at this a while back but couldn't figure out how to migrate bookmarks from Arc to Zen. Is that possible now?
Why is the first thing after the "calmer internet" intro an ad to another app?
The pivot from one new browser to another new ai browser was insanely bad optics and aura loss.
+1 for Zen. It's got a lot of Arc's neat UX but without all the AI garbage.