I Stopped Using Safari on My Mac. Arc Wasn’t the Answer Either.

I switched to Arc for six months. Then The Browser Company decided Arc wasn’t the answer either.

I should be honest about how this story ends before I tell you how it starts. The browser I am going to spend the next thousand words explaining is no longer being developed. The Browser Company stopped active development on Arc in May 2025, then got acquired by Atlassian for a reported $610 million in September. Arc still works. It still gets security patches. The company that built it has moved on to a new product called Dia, and Arc is what they left behind on the way out.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

So this is partly a piece about why I left Safari, and partly a piece about what happens when the thing you replaced it with leaves you too. One thing before we start. The switch I am describing was on my Mac, where I do my real work. On my iPhone the story ends differently, and I will get to that, because pretending otherwise would undercut the whole point.

Why I left Safari

There wasn’t one reason. There were three.

The first was tabs. I do most of my reading and writing on a Mac, and Safari’s tab behaviour kept losing me work. I would open something, get pulled into a different task, come back two hours later to find Safari had quietly closed tabs I had not finished with. I tried pinning. I tried tab groups. None of it stuck. The fundamental problem was that Safari treats tabs as transient, and I treat them as a to-do list, and we never agreed on what was happening.

The second was the way Safari handled cross-device sync. In theory, iCloud Tabs is a clean feature. In practice, the tab I opened on my iPhone an hour ago would show up on my Mac sometimes, not at others, and I never figured out the rule. I had stopped trusting Handoff entirely after the third time I tried to pick up an article on my Mac and found it had not synced across.

The third was harder to articulate, and I will try to be careful here. Safari felt like a browser designed for someone who used the web casually. Open a page, read it, close it, move on. I do not use the web casually. I write four articles a week and a long-form research session for one article might mean fifty tabs open across three different threads. Safari’s design treats that as a problem to be solved by closing the tabs. I do not want them closed. I want them organised.

That was when I started looking at Arc.

What Arc actually did differently

I will keep this short because if you are reading this in 2026 you have probably seen the Arc takes a dozen times already.

The sidebar instead of a top tab bar. Spaces, which let you keep work and personal browsing in different rooms instead of different windows. Pinned tabs that actually stayed pinned. A “little arc” feature on iPhone that opened links in a small floating window rather than taking over the screen.

The thing I want to single out, because it is the thing I actually missed most when Arc development stopped, is the way Arc handled tab lifetime. Unpinned tabs disappeared after a day, or a week, or however long you set. Pinned tabs stayed. The result was that my browser cleaned itself up at the end of every day without me doing anything. I could open thirty tabs while researching an article and Arc would have quietly tidied them away by the next morning. That removed an entire category of friction I had not realised was costing me time.

There were things I disliked. The keyboard shortcuts were aggressive and overwritten in ways that occasionally fought macOS conventions. The mobile app was strange. Arc Search on iPhone was a separate thing from Arc on Mac, and the relationship between the two was never clear to me. I used Arc on iPhone alongside Safari for a while and never fully committed to it for mobile browsing.

The desktop experience was a genuine step change. For about five months, I was a convert.

What happened in May 2025

I want to describe the moment I found out Arc was being discontinued because it might be the most useful part of this article.

I was reading the news the way you read tech news in 2025, which is half on Mastodon, half from the people you follow on Medium and Substack. Someone shared a link. Josh Miller, the CEO of The Browser Company, had written a blog post explaining that they were stopping active development on Arc to focus on a new AI-powered browser called Dia.

I read the post twice. The reasons were stated frankly, which I respected. Miller wrote that Arc had a “novelty tax” problem, too different for too little reward for most users. Spaces, the feature I used every day, were only used by 5 to 12 percent of users. The calendar preview was used by 0.4 percent.

I sat with that for a while.

The thing that bothered me was not that Arc was being discontinued. Companies pivot. Products get sunset. The thing that bothered me was the realisation that I had spent six months adapting my workflow to a tool that was failing commercially while I was using it, and I had no way to know it was failing because I was inside it.

That is a different kind of failure to the ones I am used to thinking about. The product worked. The team was responsive. The updates kept coming. The underlying business was not viable, and no amount of personal satisfaction with the tool was going to change that.

What I do now

I have not gone back to Safari on the Mac. I want to explain why, because it would be the obvious move, and the obvious move would be wrong.

The reason Safari was not the right browser for me has not changed. Safari is still designed for casual browsing. I am still not a casual browser. Going back to Safari would not solve the underlying mismatch.

What I did instead, and what I am still doing several months later, is something closer to a hedged bet. I am still using Arc for daily browsing on the Mac, because it still works and the features I liked have not disappeared. I am also slowly trying alternatives in the background. I tested Zen Browser, which is Firefox-based and open-source and currently the closest thing to Arc in feel. I have spent some time with Brave, which I find faster but less pleasant to use. I keep an eye on what the team behind Arc is doing with Dia, though I am not signed up for the beta and I have not committed to caring about it yet.

On iPhone, I went back to Safari. The Arc mobile experience never replaced it for me, and now that Arc is in maintenance mode, I do not want to depend on a mobile browser whose development has stopped. That is a small concession but worth being honest about, and it is why the title of this piece is about my Mac and not my whole life.

The thing I learned that wasn’t about browsers

The lesson I took from the six months, more than anything specific about Arc or Safari, was about how much of my workflow had been built around a tool that I had assumed would still exist in five years.

Most of the tools I use have been around for a decade or more. Apple Notes, Mail, Calendar, the system apps that come with the operating system. I never had to think about whether they would still be there next year, because Apple’s incentive to keep them alive is structural. They ship with the phone.

Arc was different. Arc was a venture-backed product from a startup, and venture-backed products from startups can disappear. They can pivot. They can get acquired by a company with completely different priorities. Atlassian acquired The Browser Company specifically because they want to build the AI browser for knowledge workers, which is a different thing from what Arc was.

I think the lesson, and I am not sure this is the right way to put it, is something like this. The more of your workflow depends on a single third-party tool, the more exposed you are when the company running that tool changes direction. That is obvious in retrospect. It was not obvious to me when I was choosing a browser.

I am still trying to work out what to do with that lesson. The honest answer is that I have not done much yet. I still use Arc. I am still vulnerable in the same way I was a year ago. Knowing the risk and acting on it are different things, and I am only doing the first one.

What I would tell someone considering Arc today

If you are reading this in 2026 and thinking about switching to Arc because you saw an old article praising it, here is what I would say.

Arc still works. The browser is in maintenance mode but it is not abandoned in the sense that it suddenly stops functioning. You can download it. You can use it. The features that made it useful are still there.

You would be starting your relationship with a tool whose company has already moved on. Bug fixes will come. New features will not. The Arc you adopt in 2026 is the Arc that existed in May 2025, and that is the Arc you will be using for as long as you stay with it.

For someone like me, who was already inside the workflow, that has been an acceptable trade-off. For someone starting fresh, I think the honest recommendation is to look at Zen, which is open-source and actively developed, or to wait and see what Dia turns into. Or to use Safari, if Safari fits how you actually browse.

I left Safari. Arc was not the answer in any permanent sense. I am still working out what it is. That is roughly where I am, and I thought it was worth writing down because I do not think I am the only one in this position.

If you want a longer write-up on building a productive workflow on Apple devices without depending on subscription tools, I keep a guide on Gumroad. It is not specifically about browsers, but it covers the principle behind it: picking native, durable tools over fashionable ones.

You can find it here: **the-free-stack**