The Arc of Browsing Bends Towards Firefox Yet Again

The Arc Browser will go away by December, as the company behind it will pursue their AI-first browser. I like the Chromium based Arc browser, as it moves its UI out of my sight when I don’t interact with it, and has its tabs to the side. I’ve been using Arc for some years since 2023. Last December it was announced they would not develop it further, and now it’s clear a year on it will disappear. A colleague pointed me to the Zen browser last March, which takes inspiration from Arc’s UI, and I installed it back then. It is based on Firefox. I have a bit of an on-off relationship with Firefox across the two decades it’s been around. It is the open source browser the Mozilla Foundation makes, and it should actually be my browser by default. Yet every other version turns out to be eating up my laptop memory and sending the fans spinning for take-off, and the application has increased in interface clunkiness over time. The Zen browser seeks to bring Arc’s clean interface to Firefox. So I…