this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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It’s dead and they’re replacing it with an AI-first browser. Gross.
If you want the main things Arc gives you (vertical tabs, tab groups), you can get them with Firefox or a Firefox spinoff like Librewolf.
Zen browser is basically FireFox made to look like Arc
Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there's little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.
I... Think Zen offers a bit more than just vertical tabs over Firefox.
Plus, the vertical bar looks really fat compared to the top bar on Firefox, for no reason.
Yes, I am fat-shaming the vertical bar. It has no right to be that fat compared to the rest of the UI.
Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.
Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I'm typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.
The idea is to hide it altogether when you're not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.
I'm aware of this, but even that single row of icons is very fat compared to the rest of the bars that exist on the browser (e.g. the window bar, the bookmarks bar, the search bar, etc). It just looks out of place.
You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it's a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.
I don't know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they're in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just... hide it when I'm not tabbing, so it's not an issue at all for me. Although I'll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it's a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).
I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is... quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.
Haha, it's funny that you went that far. I think the reason why I notice it and you don't, is the 4k factor. My screen is 1920x1200 iirc.
Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.
But yeah, if you're already in a 19:10 display you generally won't want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It's probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.
Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We're in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.
Zen also attempts to remove the telemetry that firefox has baked in.
But Zen also has features other than just vertical tabs that are really useful, like Glance.
I really like the split view in Zen. I wish it supported drag and dropping links across pages but it's still handy.
Firefox vertical tabs are lackluster though, you don't have pinned and essential tabs on FF, and you also miss out on Glance (the pop out link feature), basically the main features it copied from Arc. Honestly it's been very stable for me, and it's matured enough that I'd recommend giving it another shot.
You absolutely do have pinned tabs on FF. They go double column when you shrink down the sidebar, too, which I like. And they work with tab groups. Can't believe those took so long to steal from Chrome. Did support for groups get integrated into Zen as well? That's probably my line in the sand these days.
I was interested in the Glance concept, but I did not love the implementation. It was hard to tell when you were inside a Glance tab and I ended up struggling to deploy those into a persistent tab if I wanted to keep them for later. The idea was intriguing, but I never clicked with the details of the UX. It always took a little bit more thinking to work around than just... right clicking into new tab, I guess.
The pinned tabs are closer to the essentials though that's the thing, it lacks that 2 layer separation based on purpose.
Wdym hard to tell you're in a glance tab? It's an overlayed smaller box, and the tab that has it open also gets an icon. Plus you never go into it accidentally, unless you're clicking on a link in an essential tab it's going to be manually entered.
It's been a while and I forget the details of exactly what flow or set of steps led to me impotently clicking on things that were unresponsive because a Glance popup was on. I remember being annoyed by it relatively frequently. The memory I have of it was that Glance was cool to have going into it, but almost always frustrating to have to close again.
To be clear, I have no horse in this race. I encourage people to try Zen and Firefox and pick either of them over any of the Chromium hordes. I'm just explaining why I went into Zen, used it primarily for a while, side-by-side with Firefox when vertical tabs came in and then phased it out because FF was a better fit for me. There is no us vs them here at all.
Zen is a lot more than just vertical tabs. And I have never run into any "pains and bugs".
Same. I've been using it daily for the best part of a year and it's been pretty pleasant to use throughout.
Really? Huh. I only stuck with it as a daily driver for maybe a couple of months just before FF rolled out vertical tabs, but it was quite rough for me.
Why do people want vertical tabs? It feels as if it just takes up more space, and my muscle memory after all these years makes me move to the top. I always go back to horizontal tabs after using vertical tabs for a day.
Because web content is increasingly mobile and vertical-oriented. So the horizontal space is usually empty anyway.
Sometimes new things take time to get used to but if you try it for more than a single day you may find that you like it.
Makes sense. The sites I am using most probably have not adopted the new style yet. And like I said, the hardest part is the muscle memory of looking at the top for my tabs and moving my mouse to the top to select a tab.
because when you have more than 8 tabs open on a horizontal tab row, the tab handles start to become narrower and tab titles become unreadable and almost useless. with vertical tabs tab titles can be as long as you see fit, and the tab title does not take away space from other tab handles so more can fit. essentially its more space efficient I think.
but I don't use it because my firefox theme breaks down when I set up vertical tabs, and everything will be white, even though I don't even use userchrome customizations
I prefer the overview I get with them. I’m on an ultrawide monitor so it’s not like I’m sacrificing horizontal space either.
Yeah, on a widescreen or 4K, I can see the appeal.
i would like to move from zen to firefox, but as of right now i’m somewhat unhappy with the vertical tabs in firefox. i’ll keep an eye on them though and make the switch once they got some more features (like only appearing when mousing to the left edge of the window and staying entirely hidden otherwise)
You should try the Shimmer userchrome tweaks along with the Sideberry extension. With both of them it's even better than Zen IMO.
thanks a lot, i’ll check them out!
You can set them up so they only deploy when tapping the sidebar icon and stay hidden otherwise, which is my compromise for that. I thought it'd take me longer to adapt to that when moving back from Zen, but since the top bar does deploy on proximity when using fullscreen I find it's pretty intuitive to deploy and hide them both on mouse and touch, and I have to admit that not having them deploy accidentally when hidden is actually nice.
I do like the vertical tab pins better on Firefox, and with the new tab grouping being supported on vertical tabs I am quite happy with the setup. It takes longer to set up the way I want it compared to Zen, but honestly, I'm quite happy with it now. I'd have considered going back because more alternatives is better, but frankly Zen just had too many significant bugs in my time with it, and since it doesn't just use the engine, but it's also hooked up to Firefox's account system for a bunch of stuff it just didn't seem worth the hassle. Have they polished it up any in the past few months?
well, i don’t know the last state you know, but they added a floating search bar, which is pretty, but not beneficial beyond that i think. they added a default shortcut for copying the current webaddress which i sorely miss on mullvad. besides i dont think they added any major features i would’ve noticed, but it feels like a very stable experience atm, both on linux and macos.
Zen makes something like 84 external connections, which is around double what even Edge makes (and Microsoft has basically become a malware company).
Number of external connections means little without context of the content and what they are for.
This was patched, and the vast majority were just fetching thumbnails.
tab groups in firefox are surprisingly good! even alongside a tab group management addon. they complement each other, like when you don't want to create a bunch of subgroups for an exclusive view but just collapse them
They're obviously going for a zero adoption policy and trying to think of the most repulsive options
Does any other browser let me open 2 windows with the same synced tabs? Also, permanent per-space tabs, please.
Zen does
Ok, thanks! Good to know there's a backup plan. For now Arc still works fine, just no updates anymore.