Which Browser After Arc? Zen, Vivaldi, Dia and the Boring Options Compared

Arc was the first browser in a long time that people were evangelical about. Spaces gave each project its own set of tabs, the sidebar made tabs readable, Little Arc kept links from other apps from cluttering the main window, and the Command Bar meant you rarely touched the mouse. It was also, it turned out, a product looking for a business model.

In May 2025 The Browser Company said it would stop building new features for Arc and put its effort into Dia, an AI-first browser. In September 2025 Atlassian agreed to buy the company for $610 million in cash. Arc still installs, still runs and still picks up Chromium security fixes, but its team has moved on and nobody has committed to keeping its sync servers alive. If it was your daily browser, the sensible thing is to decide where you are going before you are forced to.

We moved a mix of Mac, Windows and Linux machines off Arc over the past year. This is what each option is actually like to live in.

First, what you actually used

Arc had five things people miss, and no replacement has all five. Before you pick, be honest about which ones you leaned on.

• Vertical tabs in a sidebar. Now native in almost everything, including Chrome and Edge.
• Spaces. Separate tab sets per project, with their own colour. Zen, Vivaldi and Edge all have a version.
• Split view. Zen, Vivaldi and Dia have it; Chrome does not.
• Little Arc. Links from other apps opening in a small throwaway window. Nothing else does this well. Zen's Glance is the nearest.
• The Command Bar. Keyboard-first tab switching and commands. Vivaldi's Quick Commands is the closest match; Zen and Firefox rely on the address bar.

Most people, pressed, name two of those. That makes the choice easier than it looks.

Zen: the closest free replacement

Zen is a fork of Firefox, open source under the Mozilla Public Licence, built by a small community and released on Windows, macOS and Linux. It is the browser that looks most like Arc: a vertical sidebar that collapses to icons in compact mode, workspaces that separate tabs by project, split view for two pages side by side, nested tab folders, and Glance, which opens a link in a modal preview over the current page rather than in a new tab.

It is also the browser that asks the most of you. It runs Firefox add-ons rather than Chrome extensions, which covers the popular ones — uBlock Origin, the password managers we compared, Obsidian's clipper — but not the long tail, and not an internal tool your employer built for Chrome. Some DRM-protected streaming can be awkward on Firefox forks. And it is a community project on a fast release cadence, which means the odd rough edge and a settings screen that changes between versions.

Zen is the right answer if Arc's layout was the point and you can live without Chrome extensions. That is a real trade, and worth making deliberately.

Vivaldi: the one that has been here all along

Vivaldi has been shipping since 2015, is built on Chromium, runs every Chrome extension, and is free on desktop, Android and iOS. It has workspaces, two-level tab stacks, tab tiling for split views, tab hibernation for the two hundred tabs you have not looked at since March, and a tab bar that can sit on the left to give you vertical tabs. There is a mail client, a calendar and a feed reader inside it if you want them and an option to hide them if you do not.

The cost is density. Out of the box, Vivaldi looks like a browser designed by people who love settings, because it is. It takes an afternoon of turning things off to get something as calm as Arc, and the result never quite has Arc's polish. In exchange you get a company with a decade of releases behind it, no venture capital and no acquirer, which after the last eighteen months is worth a great deal.

Dia: the official successor that is not one

Dia is what The Browser Company built instead of Arc, and it is a different product. The browser itself is deliberately plain — profiles, tab groups, split view, a built-in ad blocker and sync are on the free plan — and the point is the assistant: chat with your open tabs, draft from what you are reading, and on the paid tiers generate briefs and recaps from your documents. Better Answers is $20 a month; Better Days is $100 a month and pitched at people who live in meetings.

It runs only on macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. There is no Windows or Linux version and no date for one. If you loved Arc for the sidebar and Spaces, Dia will feel like a step backwards with a chatbot attached. If what you actually wanted was an assistant that can see your tabs — a use we found genuinely handy when comparing paid AI assistants — then the free plan is a reasonable place to try it, and the $20 tier is priced against the assistants, not the browsers.

The boring answer: Chrome or Edge

Here is the thing the browser enthusiasts skip over. Chrome added native vertical tabs to its stable release in early 2026: right-click the tab strip and choose Show Tabs Vertically. Edge has had vertical tabs, sleeping tabs and Workspaces for years, and its Workspaces are now a solid local project-per-window feature even after Microsoft removed the ability to share one with a colleague. Both are free, both run every extension, both are on every platform, and both will exist in five years.

What you give up is the feel. Neither has split view, neither has anything like Little Arc, and Chrome's tab groups are a poor substitute for Spaces. But if the two things you named at the top were vertical tabs and extensions, this is where you should go, and a couple of the extensions we rate will cover most of the rest.

Side by side

Browser	Engine	Platforms	Workspaces	Split view	Extensions	Price
Zen	Firefox	Windows, macOS, Linux	Yes	Yes	Firefox add-ons	Free, open source
Vivaldi	Chromium	Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS	Yes	Yes (tiling)	Chrome	Free
Dia	Chromium	macOS 14+, Apple Silicon	Profiles and tab groups	Yes	Chrome	Free; $20 or $100 a month for AI
Chrome	Chromium	Everywhere	Tab groups	No	Chrome	Free
Edge	Chromium	Everywhere	Yes	Yes	Chrome	Free
Arc	Chromium	macOS, Windows	Yes	Yes	Chrome	Free, maintenance only

What we did

The Mac users who cared most about the sidebar went to Zen and have stayed, with one exception who needed a Chrome-only internal tool and landed on Vivaldi. The Windows and Linux machines went to Vivaldi or straight to Edge with vertical tabs. Nobody kept Dia past the trial, though one of us pays for an assistant separately and could see the appeal.

The lesson we took from Arc is the one we keep taking from software this decade: a lovely product from a venture-funded company is a lease, not a purchase. Pick the replacement you can live with if its maker is bought tomorrow. For most people, that is the boring one.