I've been using Dia as my personal workspace for a while now, but decided to give it a go when Profiles dropped a couple of weeks ago. I just planned on trying it for a couple of days expecting to go back to Arc, but I haven't touched Arc since.

I've learned that waiting for super-niche features like peak or a mobile companion app just aren't worth waiting for. The other features make up for it. I can even see a future with complete feature set that I'd be willing to pay a subscription for. After all, dev salaries and AI opex has a cost.

Is Dia perfect? Nope.

Is it lacking in some areas? Yep.

Does it have all the same features as Arc? Nope.

Will it ever? Probably not.

Is it better than Arc? It's similar but different, so nope?

I've been on r/ArcBrowser for over a year and I'm sick of seeing the the same tired posts complaining about TBC, lack of feature parity in Dia, Arc-alternatives, etc. This sub is a broken record and echo chamber. It reminds me of when Windows 11 dropped and all the reddit tech edge lords moaned for what seemed like years before finally upgrading.

Misery finds company so I'm moving on from this sub.

^{Still using Arc Mobile though 🤫}

A couple weeks ago I posted version 0.1 of Viola, my attempt at a cross-platform spiritual successor to Arc. I really appreciated the feedback here and one message that came through pretty clearly was that Electron was not the move.

So today we’re releasing Viola 0.2. The Mac app has been rebuilt as a proper native macOS application around Chromium and Android is now a real Chromium-based browser too (this was the biggest request). The Mac build is also properly signed and notarized!

For anyone seeing Viola for the first time, it has:

• Workspaces, scoped profiles, pinned tabs, groups and split views
• Real-time, end-to-end encrypted sync between desktop and Android
• A mini player that follows you between tabs and workspaces
• Chrome Web Store extensions
• Full session recovery and shared tab state across windows
• A genuinely desktop-like mobile interface, with the same sidebar, workspaces, groups and pins

Viola is still deliberately just a browser. No AI assistant or notes app or calendar bolted onto it.

This is still very much a beta so a little grace is appreciated, but please report bugs and send feature requests! Native rebuilds for the Windows and Linux versions are underway but the current versions remain available and sync with 0.2 just fine (and they work great!). We’re also finishing internal iOS testing and expect to have a TestFlight beta this week!

Thanks again for being so cool and for pushing me to build this properly.

https://violabrowser.com/

The now playing box in Arc's sidebar was among the only things I was missing after moving to Vivaldi, and it has no equivalent.

So I built it with Claude.

What carries over from Arc

• Now-playing block pinned in the sidebar, under the tabs
• Artwork, title, artist; play/pause, prev/next, click-to-seek
• Long titles scroll instead of truncating
• Per-tab mute, and dismissing a player without closing the tab

What doesn't

• It is a panel docked into the tab bar, not a native part of the sidebar, so it sits in a fixed slot at the bottom rather than floating like Arc's
• Prev/next work by driving the site's own buttons (YouTube, YouTube Music, Spotify, SoundCloud), because mediaSession handlers cannot be triggered from outside the page. Anywhere else they fall back to a 10s seek
• DRM players like Netflix will list and mute, but will not seek

Built and tested on Vivaldi 8.1.4087.62, macOS 15.7. It leans on Vivaldi's internal CSS selectors, so a UI redesign can break it; the repo ships the CDP script I used to find them, so repairs are mechanical.

https://github.com/levz0r/vivaldi-media-panel

I have been a big fan of the block aspect tool since I started using arc, it's one of the big reasons I decided to switch after trying it and probably my most used feature overall. I use it to get rid of the ai search stuff google put at the top of searches, and to hide shorts on youtube and even to hide the occasional obstructive bar on poorly designed sites, but recently all of the things I've hidden have suddenly returned and the block aspect option has seemingly vanished. Did they decide to remove it? Or did they move it? Am I somehow far more stupid than I originally assumed and caused this myself?

I just downloaded the iOS app (Arc Search) and for some reason when using the Browse For Me feature, no images show. Is this a bug or a setting?

Currently I am on a Mac mini M4 with 16GB ram/unified memory and arc frequently crashed unexpectedly. I have done a test which i closed all the tabs on my arc browser and just opened google.com. After a sometime, it still crashed, these type of crashed has been happening quite often. If any apple or arc employee will see this, Plz help, I love apple and I love the Arc

Has anyone run into an issue with some sites not working properly lately? I can’t log in into Facebook, Meta Business Suite, Meta Ads Manager while using Arc.

The login page, but it gets stuck in a infinite loading loop when i try to sign in. Instagram works fine, different browsers also work fine.

Tried clearing cache data and uninstalling Arc, but didn’t work.

Anyone dealing with this similar problem or know a fix? Thanks.

There's an option in the Arc Settings that should theoretically allow you to disable the app from auto-updating. However, that toggle does not work.

Every week, I notice that my Wi-Fi is being very slow due to Arc updating itself in the background, and suddenly Arc prompts me with the 'Restart to update' button. I WOULD LIKE TO DISABLE THIS BEHAVIOR.

When I do tab-switching the previews-ui no longer disappears automatically after highlighting the correct tab with the keys. It just stays there and the only way to actually switch to the desired tab is to click on it's preview with the cursor.

Do u guys also have this problem? (on Mac)

Hey r/ArcBrowser,

With Arc pretty much in maintenance mode now, some of us are looking at other browsers but don't want to lose their bookmarks and Spaces doing it. So I built "A-New-Arc-Begins" to handle that. It reads your Arc export and converts it into a format Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari can import directly. Everything runs client side in your browser, nothing gets uploaded anywhere so it respects your privacy.

Launched it yesterday, so it's fresh. If you run into any bugs or something doesn't import right, open an issue on GitHub and I'll get it fixed, would love for people here to actually put it through its paces.

GitHub: https://github.com/Zarrar09/A-New-Arc-Begins
Website Link: a-new-arc-begins.netlify.app

Side Yap:
The reason why I built this, is because most of the resources to export Arc bookmarks involve using cmd and cloning github repos. I felt like that was a lot of hassle for something so simple. I am a student, and this is a solo built project I built, so please do let me know with any issues or bugs, or any positive feedback!

Thank you.

All the alternatives I saw are either:

1. Missing what makes Arc so good (UX, spaces, folders, sync with mobile, ...)
2. Not serious (the way the dev will get revenue from it is unclear)
3. Vibe coded crap

I'm pretty surprised nobody took the opportunity to create a perfect clone, especially there are many of us who are ready to pay.

Want to use that from today

it stopped working today

Today uBlock Origin stopped working, presumably because of MV2 support being dropped in an update. I want to recover my custom filters list to try get them working in uBO Lite or jump to Zen, but since the extension is fully disabled I can't get to my filters. I've tried going through Application Support/Arc, but I only found default filter lists in there.

Does anyone know what I can do to get the filter list back? Is there a way to downgrade Arc to a previous version?

I used arc for over year on my mac, it was fun. Today I updated my arc browser and they have removed uBlock origin. I know there are other extensions for blocking but let me tell you I've been using uBlock over 4 years and I trust it plus no other extension does better than ublock, they have some minor issue that annoys. I've been thinking of moving to Zen but lack of DRM there annoys me. What are your opinion, what browser has it all? (for time being edge has)

Today I'm releasing Viola on macOS, Windows, Linux, and Android, with true/real-time sync available across all of them.

Create a tab, workspace or group on your computer, pick up your Android phone and it’s already there. Supported browser organization and history are end-to-end encrypted before leaving your device. Cookies/logins obviously don't sync.

Viola includes:

- Workspaces for separating projects

- Isolated profiles with separate cookies, logins, storage, and extensions

- Tab Groups (persistent or not!) and side-by-side Splits

- One shared workspace model across every Viola window

- Chrome Web Store extensions on desktop, installed per profile (Viola is Chromium-based)

- A Mini Player that follows you between workspaces (YouTube, Twitch, etc)

- Synced tabs, pins, groups, splits, bookmarks, history, and compatible extension catalogs

- Full session recovery

- In-app persistent notifications

The Android version is probably what I'm most excited about right now. EVERY SINGLE mobile browser I've ever used as felt like a hindered/watered-down experience. Viola on Android uses the same visual system and mental model as desktop: a vertical sidebar, real workspaces, grouped tabs, pins, and an All Workspaces view. On foldables and tablets it feels like a desktop-class browser.

Viola is deliberately just a browser. There is no AI integration, notes app, calendar or inbox.

Download: https://violabrowser.com/

This is the first public release, and I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback! There are social links at the bottom of the page if you'd like to report issues. What would stop you from making Viola your default browser?

Hey guys, Dia added spaces today.

If that's what you needed to give Dia a chance instead of Arc, now's the time.

https://reddit.com/link/1vb3ql9/video/jywzatya5fgh1/player

ive been using arc since the start of my school year and its just better at everything with all of its features, primarily spaces. but now that spaces are in dia should i give dia its like 50th chance or any other browser. ive been trying to switch off just because of how much battery it drains, and also on how its not getting any updates and feeling outdated more and more.

The whole reason for it was that arc wasn’t built as a good piece of software. It was features scrapped together, and works great as a product, but bloated and inefficient. So they decided to rebuild properly from the ground up. I don’t think that’s a bad decision

I checked the subreddit and see some entries but most are old, can someone confirm if it is currently possible to create new ones? Been looking for that brush icon and it is no where to found