A few years ago, I moved to Arc as my default browser. I felt like everything was immediately upgraded: finally, a web browser worked how I needed it to. The interface got out of the way; it was superpowered with keyboard shortcuts that just made sense (a bit like other professional tools like Superhuman); and its profiles feature allowed me to fully sandbox my work activity away from my personal activity. It’s how I want a browser to work.
Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to the goals its vendor, The Browser Company, had set up for it. It was a niche tool for a certain kind of power user, which didn’t justify the company’s valuation. Had it been a product made by an independent company, I would have gladly paid for it, and it might have formed the basis of a sustainable business. But The Browser Company needed scale, and it was not to be.
Instead, The Browser Company took advantage of the buzz around AI, and created a new, AI-focused browser called Dia. Rather than build these features into Arc, the company tried again: it lost most of Arc’s power user features and added AI to a browser framework that isn’t a million miles away from stock Chrome. The learning curve was removed, but so was the utility. Meanwhile, Arc is not gone, but it’s certainly on life support, with no new features planned.
I tried to love Dia, but I’m not bullish about it. It really has lost the power user features that made Arc special: the excellent tab sidebar is gone and profile switching is nowhere near as fluid. But it also has far more competition: Perplexity has introduced Comet, its own AI browser, and Chrome itself has built-in Gemini features. It’s not clear why Dia would do better. And ironically, The Browser Company now charges $20/month, the same amount I would gladly have paid for Arc. Unless The Browser Company has something amazing up its sleeve, I think it’s destined for an acquisition that might see features from its own products incorporated into someone else’s.
Because Dia is heavily oriented around contextual AI, I’m also worried about the privacy of my browsing. One feature allows your discussions with an AI model to be informed by your recent browsing history, which requires sending a supposedly-protected version of that history to their servers. No thanks: that’s a judgment call for my personal data, but it’s an absolute no-go for my work browsing. You can turn that feature off, but it’s not a given that this contextual information isn’t shared any other way.
Which left me hunting for another browser. I cannot compromise my data, and I’m not interested in investing in a product that I think will be going away soon.
Firefox remains the gold standard for user-first browsing. Unfortunately, while the original Firefox was a huge step forward in browsing user experience (certainly over the original Mozilla browser, but also over everything else at the time), it now feels pretty clunky. Each function works well, but it doesn’t feel like much thought has been put into the experience of using Firefox overall; the user journey to get things done often feels disjointed, and the browser interface is always there, taking up screen real estate. It was my first stop as a replacement once I chose to move on from Dia, but I pined for the power user features I enjoyed with Arc. It’s fine but not delightful.
So I was pleased to rediscover Zen Browser, which has improved in leaps and bounds since I last tried it. It has a very Arc-inspired UI that gets out of your face quickly, with all the customization and keyboard shortcuts you’d expect from something built on top of Firefox. I use vertical tabs in a sidebar that auto-hides, and I can navigate just as smoothly as I ever did with Arc.
The Firefox framework itself has gained a new profile manager, which is the last remaining piece. Although you have to turn it on through a switch buried deep in your settings, once you do, you can easily flip between browser contexts, and I can once again have fully independent work and personal browser windows. The previous one looked like it had been built in Perl in 1996, and was really optimized to use via the command line; the new one is what you’d expect from a browser that cares about non-developer users.
To be clear, there are some weird quirks. Keyboard shortcuts have to be set up for every profile, which doesn’t make sense to me. Computers are typically single-user, and profiles are for different contexts, not people; unifying shortcuts across them should at least be an option. And syncing with a Firefox account only works one profile at a time, so if you want to sync multiple profiles, you need to create multiple Firefox accounts. (I've chosen to sync my personal profile but not my work data.) But these are all weirdnesses that are inherited from the core Firefox product; Zen Browser has made the best of these raw ingredients and built something pretty special.
So, as of now, it’s my default browser. It can be yours, too: it works across all major desktop platforms. I think, right now at least, that it’s the best of the bunch.
But I do have a question. Given how much better Zen is than stock Firefox, why isn’t it Firefox? Mozilla should take this team, absorb it, and use it to help navigate the future of their flagship browser for end users. Firefox is a great framework for developers to innovate their own browser experiences, but it also needs a default way for users to experience its functionality. Zen Browser should be it.