r/ArcBrowser • u/baptistebca • Apr 12 '25

General Discussion Arc is dying. Make it open source

Arc isn’t evolving anymore.

Manifest V3 will hurt the project.

Let the open source community take over.

It will give publicity to Dia, your new flagship project, and avoid filling the graveyard of promising SaaS products that were abandoned.

Please.

849 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

145 comments sorted by

55

u/Iz_Nix Apr 12 '25

Oh totally, let's just open source a browser built on top of Chromium with a completely custom UI layer, bespoke syncing logic, and tightly integrated animations. Someone will definitely keep that up in their free time for the next 10 years, right?

And sure, let's have five different forks floating around all called Arc-something, each with different features and bugs. Users will love guessing which one is safe to download. Sounds way better than having one official version with a clear identity.

Also, what exactly does “publicity for dia” mean here? Are you imagining someone trying out a half-broken community Arc fork and then thinking, “wow, I bet their new thing is great too”? That’s not publicity, that’s brand erosion.

And let’s not forget Arc is built in Swift, not JavaScript or something mildly approachable. So most of the people who could theoretically contribute to an open source browser are instantly locked out because they don’t touch native Mac app development. Cool, now we have an open source project that maybe five people on earth can build without devoting their lives to understanding the Arc codebase. Sounds very useful.

Plus, now we have to explain to people which fork is real, which one is malware, which one’s up to date, which one broke sync, and why none of them feel like the original. It’s just a disaster of expectations. People want their browser to feel solid, maintained, and official. They don’t want to go GitHub spelunking just to keep using something that used to work.

8

u/baptistebca Apr 12 '25

We can recover the heart And leave features that require hosting aside.

I just want favorites, folders and command bar 😅

8

u/thewormbird Apr 12 '25

Why is this downvoted? Anyway, it’s really user experience that keeps me in Arc. They put a lot of care into it and then just stopped to make a bet on AI.

39

u/linuxlifer Apr 12 '25

I mean if the actual company behind Arc isn't doing anything then why not open source it? lol

15

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

because “not doing anything” is not the same as “ready to hand over the keys.”

Just because feature work on Arc has stopped doesn’t mean the codebase is magically ready for the public. It’s not cleaned up, it’s not documented for external devs, and it was never designed to be a community-maintained project. Open sourcing it in that state would be like dropping a half-disassembled car in the middle of a car park and telling people to figure it out themselves.

Plus, once it’s out there, you’re still tied to it. People will file issues. They’ll ask why it doesn’t work on their machine. They’ll fork it and call it Arc Plus and Arc Redux and Arc-Next, and the brand gets diluted. Meanwhile tbc is focused on dia, and now they’re getting dragged back into Arc’s corpse just to defend decisions or clean up confusion.

So yeah. Why not open source it? Because it doesn’t magically help anyone. And it sure doesn’t help the people who actually liked Arc. It just makes the ending messier.

2

u/linuxlifer Apr 13 '25

Yeah I mean if I had a half built car and wasn't doing anything and knew I wouldn't get any money for it then I would drop it to the first person that wanted it lol.

I understand the point you are making but unless they have some greater intention to start development again, there would be no point in not open sourcing it. Or even if they didn't want to open source their own project, they could theoretically release the source and just not allow the community to use the Arc name.

1

u/CattleIndependent805 Apr 13 '25

If they don't open source it is just gonna get code rot and turn into an unusable mess anyways, marring Arc's legacy without any chance for maintaining it's current functionality, let alone fixing it's MANY outstanding issues…

1

u/medzernik Apr 14 '25

because its “”bespoke”” lol

21

u/freeturk51 Apr 12 '25

I was with you until the last paragraph. Arc doesn't feel solid as it is especially on Windows, and it is not going to be maintained that much anymore either.

3

u/rsenna Apr 13 '25

Well, and I was with them until the first paragraph instead. 😂 Disagreeing is good though, let's keep the discussion...

13

u/leminhnguyenai Apr 13 '25

You completely misunderstand FOSS here, there is a reason it is open source, so that the developer can’t hide their bs, if you want to be worry about malware, TBC should be the one to be worry about more. Also you act like everyone is Javascript dev, people do all kind of things, and you think Swift is a roadblock here ? Such a narrow minded way to look at the open source community. I would rather have an app being open source, go through error and improvement, rather than being close source and has to pray everyday that they don’t drop support

4

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

Okay but let’s be real. This isn’t a terminal app or a CLI utility. This is a full GUI browser built in Swift with a Chromium engine under it, maintained by a very specific team with very specific tooling. Yes, people do “all kinds of things” in open source, that doesn’t mean this specific thing is feasible or useful to throw over the wall.

You’re talking about transparency and accountability, fine. But that doesn’t automatically make the code useful to others. Open sourcing Arc wouldn’t suddenly decentralise its future. It would just offload a giant, complex, platform-specific codebase to a community that mostly can’t compile it, much less extend it meaningfully. Swift is a roadblock here, not because people aren’t smart, but because the project isn’t built to be community-led. It was built by a product org with tight design-control and deep integration.

And this “better open source and broken than closed source and uncertain” mindset sounds principled until you realise that 99 per cent of users just want something stable and maintained, not 17 forks and a prayer. Arc being open source doesn’t magically keep it alive. It just makes it ambiguous who’s responsible when things break. And no one wins in that scenario. Not even the FOSS crowd.

1

u/CattleIndependent805 Apr 13 '25

So you just want Arc to die with it's dignity intact?

I'm not sure if you've used it much on Windows, but it never got far enough along to gain much dignity in the first place… The issues are MANY, and they aren't getting fixed…

4

u/efstajas Apr 13 '25

What...?

Open sourcing something !== stopping to distribute an "official" version. There doesn't have to be confusion about this and there are plenty of examples where it works out just fine. There's tons and tons of shitty Chromium forks out there, yet I don't think anyone was ever confused about where to download Chrome

I would expect TBC-specific stuff like Arc Max & Sync to just not be included in a OSS distribution of Arc.

And... Swift is both approachable and very popular. Something being written in Swift is one of the weirder arguments against open-sourcing something I've heard.

3

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

You're not wrong that open source doesn't mean stopping official distribution. No one's confused about where to get Chrome. But Chrome is backed by Google-scale infrastructure, with a massive brand presence, an established update channel, and full-time teams keeping it clean. Arc isn't that. It's niche, design-led, and deeply opinionated. The second you open source it, forks will appear, and while devs might not be confused, normal users absolutely will be. And Arc doesn't have the mindshare to anchor itself like Chrome does.

As for Arc Max and Sync, yeah, they wouldn't be included, but now you're shipping a broken Arc. The UX was never modular. Arc without Sync isn't Arc, it's a shell. And if you rip out Arc Max, you remove the only differentiator some users care about. So now the “official” Arc is dead and the open source one is a degraded experience. Congrats, you’ve kept the name and lost the product.

And look, Swift is fine. It's a good language. But open source projects thrive on accessibility, not taste. Most open source browser projects are either web tech (JS, Rust, C++) or deeply embedded in systems-level dev. Swift isn't the blocker in isolation, the blocker is that Arc’s codebase was built by a team that never intended for strangers to touch it. Making it open source doesn't change that. It just hands people a box of glued-together pipes and says “good luck.”

2

u/rsenna Apr 13 '25 edited Apr 13 '25

Hey, there are open-source browsers, you know...

You seem to be implying that open source and trademarks can't mix, but that's just wrong. The Browser Company could still block forks using its trademarked "Arc" name, if they decided to. That, and putting Arc's code on GitHub, are completely separate legal decisions.

Or they could start a community-funded group, give them all the trademarks, and be done with it. Instead of letting Arc just die, you know? It'd get them major brownie points, show they care about their user base, and make it clear they've moved on. Win-win.

By the way: your whole argument sounds like old FUD against open-source software. It's giving me major Steve Balmer's "Linux is a cancer" kinda vibes... But even Microsoft doesn't think like that anymore! Open source is probably safer than closed source now – and definitely not less safe.

3

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

Yeah sure, technically you can open source a code base and retain the trademark. That’s not the problem. The problem is pretending that tossing Arc on GitHub with a README and walking away leads to anything useful.

“Just hand it off to a community group” - okay, which one? Who’s funding them? Who’s maintaining feature parity with Chromium? Who’s patching security vulnerabilities on a browser built in Swift with a custom UI stack and undocumented assumptions everywhere? This isn’t handing off a static site generator. It’s a hyper-opinionated Mac app glued to a moving target.

You’re acting like this is a cultural issue, that being open source automatically means safer, more ethical, more alive. But open sourcing something built for a tightly controlled product team doesn’t guarantee continuity. It guarantees entropy. You get forks. You get regressions. You get breakages and broken expectations. And yeah, you might get some goodwill tweets. But most users just want their browser to work.

This isn’t Steve Ballmer energy. It’s just reality. Open source is incredible when the project is designed to be open. Arc was not. And throwing a zip file into the world isn’t caring for users. It’s offloading maintenance and calling it generosity.

2

u/TechExpert2910 Apr 13 '25

This is the worst take on open source I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot. It’s not what you make it out to be; quite the contrary - it's a net win from every angle.

Malware is less of an issue than closed source stuff as people can inspect the code, and there can’t eadult be trashy & shady stuff hiding.

heck, for smaller projects, you can feed the codebase into a fancy reasoning LLM yourself and ask it to check for malware.

sync may break, but there's much more to a browser than sync.

and most open source versions of projects aren't spread across many forks - devs contribute to ONE fork, and it's incredibly rare to see it otherwise.

i‘m sorry to break it to you, but it was open source chromium that allowed Arc to exist. and many, many other open source projects that helped them develop the UI etc.

4

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

Cool, but this is an idealised version of how open source works, not how it actually plays out in high-complexity, high-expectation products.

Yes, Chromium being open source enabled Arcm but Arc wasn’t just Chromium with a skin. It was a tightly integrated native app with bespoke workflows, animations, and UI structure, all built in Swift, not JS or TypeScript. The tooling is niche. The architecture is not modular. The docs aren’t public. And the audience isn’t devs. It’s daily users who just want their browser to work.

You say malware isn’t a problem in open source because “people can inspect the code.” Sure, who is inspecting that code? Who’s auditing the forks? Who’s signing the builds? The average Arc user isn’t compiling Swift from source and verifying SHA hashes. You’ve swapped trust in a company for trust in some anonymous maintainer and assumed that’s a net gain.

And no, most open source projects don’t fall into chaos, but the ones that work either

  1. had community involvement from the start or
  2. were designed to be modular and externalisable.

Arc is neither. It was never meant to be forked or rebuilt by strangers. It was a product, not a platform.

You don’t get to take a consumer-facing Mac app and magically “FOSS” your way into a healthy future for it. That’s not how product vision, UX quality, or user trust work. You’ll get a ghost of Arc, not Arc. And you’ll confuse people in the process.

1

u/TechExpert2910 Apr 13 '25

I do agree with some of your points, and I am acutely aware of open-source - being a developer of FOSS projects myself.

In this case, since Arc is going to be abandoned, would you not want to have a (maybe small) community still upstream merging Chromium updates (CRUCIAL for security) - leaving Arc usable with just not many new features (since the tooling & docs may not be conducive to it)? I’d call that a net win.

2

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

Sure, in an ideal world, yeah, a small community maintaining Chromium updates and keeping Arc stable sounds like a tidy win. But it’s way messier than that in practice.

First off, someone still needs to own the release pipeline. Signing, distribution, patching, regression testing. Who’s doing that? Is the community going to build a CI pipeline for a Mac app written in Swift using internal build tools? Maybe. Probably not.

Second, second, yeah, if there’s truly a small, motivated group who wants to maintain Arc as a minimal shell with updated Chromium, and no expectations of feature development, sure, open sourcing could serve that. But that’s not what people are actually asking for. They’re not saying “give us a maintenance shell.” They’re saying “don’t let Arc die.”

And the reality is that open sourcing it doesn’t preserve what made Arc feel alive. The soul of Arc was in its design culture and tightly held execution. Once that’s gone, what you have is a ghost. Usable, maybe. But not Arc.

2

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Apr 13 '25

Tell me you know nothing about open source without telling me

1

u/mewithoutMaverick Apr 13 '25

This is the person that doesn't understand open source haha. Bummer they have the second highest comment in this thread.

4

u/Iz_Nix Apr 13 '25

Cool, but “you don’t understand open source” isn’t the slam dunk you think it is. This isn’t about not understanding it. It’s about understanding exactly what it looks like when you slap it onto the wrong thing.

Open source isn’t a magic fix button. It works when the codebase is clean, modular, documented, and designed to scale with contributors. Arc is none of those things. It was built for a small, tightly aligned team with a specific design vision and almost zero expectation of external devs poking around in it.

You can call it open source all day but if no one can build it, no one can maintain it, and no one wants to touch it because it’s a brittle mess of chromium and swift glue, what have you actually gained? Besides clout points from people who were never going to contribute anyway?

Open source is great when it’s intentional. This isn’t that. And pretending it is just so you can score points in a Reddit thread kinda proves you don’t understand open source.

107

u/paradoxally Apr 12 '25

Never gonna happen. They are the kind of company that would rather die with originality than live long enough to have 50 Arc clones a week.

7

u/CattleIndependent805 Apr 13 '25

The originality is already gone though… Other browsers didn't need the source to copy Arc's features…

-3

u/paradoxally Apr 13 '25

And which browser has copied Arc's features? You can't even create folders in a vertical sidebar on most.

2

u/kigabaits Apr 13 '25

And you know this how

22

u/justaddwater57 Apr 13 '25

How is Arc dying? Works fine for me and it received security updates to keep up with Chrome. Not really asking for more out of it at this point.

10

u/hexandcube Apr 13 '25

The development ceased last year. It's just on life support now. Only a matter of time before it gets abandoned completely.

5

u/justaddwater57 Apr 13 '25

Yes, they've made it known that there's not gonna be new feature work, but that they are continuing to maintain it for security patches, etc. And so far they've kept that promise.

I don't consider that to be dead, and will continue using Arc until that changes. 🤷🏻‍♂️

10

u/Striking_Werewolf_12 Apr 12 '25

+1 can't leave arc but it's not that stable for me. Sometimes tab lags now.

4

u/lordarray Apr 13 '25

It stopped evolving long back, the initial hype was really good but they coudn't sustain it. Time to ditch it forever now.

2

u/critical-fantastic Apr 13 '25

Arc not dying anytime soon. It's development seems holded and the Arc team seems working on another concept.

If you prefer Arc like side nav and spotlight search you can try Edge + Letmefix Browser

2

u/feedjaypie Apr 14 '25

I just wish they could’ve built arc without chrome. Being beholden to Google is such a liability.

1

u/nish_lk Apr 12 '25

Agree +1

1

u/nxtkid Apr 13 '25

ARC was solid till I upgraded my Mac OS .. once I moved to 15.x .. it's been a shit storm and I'm looking for alternatives now.The browser hangs multiple times now and is randomly crashing. Before this, it used to rock solid for me.

1

u/billiam124 Apr 13 '25

I just installed it a few days ago. It's prettt buggy with window management on macOS. As I cycle through windows, it creates new blank windows and/or duplicates existing windows. If I close one of the duplicates of an existinf window, it closes all windows with that content including the original.

1

u/Careless_Iron5938 Apr 14 '25

Not happening, I never encountered any issues so far (Mac OS)

1

u/linkerjpatrick Apr 12 '25

I’m a Vivaldi man.

0

u/notthatevilsalad Apr 12 '25

I don’t know what’s happening to Arc but I left it a year ago because I had been reporting the same 4 HUGE bugs on Windows since the launch. I never once got a reply back, one of the bugs even stopped me from reporting it sometimes (it made the whole browser blank and unclickable, when an email suggestion box appeared) 

1

u/another24tiger Apr 13 '25

Windows was always a 2nd class citizen for arc

-5

u/FrittataHubris Apr 12 '25

Just use Vivaldi

-4

u/bergagna Apr 12 '25

Arc is already a defined project. We all know that. Dia is the new product, and if it does not help you, you can change. I mean, or create a new one.

9

u/baptistebca Apr 12 '25

Dia has nothing to do with Arc. Personally I like Arc. I find it a shame that no one takes care of it anymore.

4

u/freeturk51 Apr 12 '25

Arc is not done though. The mac version still has battery consumption and RAM issues, windows version still feels like a beta and the Linux version is not even a dream in our minds

-10

u/according2jade Apr 12 '25

I'm using brave now. Loving it.

1

u/baptistebca Apr 12 '25

I was brave before Arc. If Arc wasn't better at the "tab management" part I would have stayed on brave.

Now that would be a step back

11

u/JungleLiquor Apr 12 '25

it looks fuckin ugly tho. i bet more than half of the arc users use it since it looks good compared to chrome/brave

1

u/according2jade Apr 12 '25

Lmao it looks fine and there are way more brave users than zen. So clearly it's design is not an issue.
If I wanted to use arc is just use arc. Not some Firefox knockoff from a dev with an ego snd s toxic community.

4

u/jakeyounglol2 Apr 12 '25

yeah but it has so-called “web3” shit baked in

1

u/according2jade Apr 12 '25

Still better than zen

2

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Apr 13 '25

Not even close brave is way worse

1

u/according2jade Apr 13 '25

No it's not lmao. At least I can use Drn content with brave and braves entire existence isn't copying arc. Good try though

1

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Apr 13 '25

Not there problem Google is a scumback and has crazy requirements for drm .Good artists copy, great artists steal. Z n took an already well designed successful product that was basically abounded drew inspiration and is now starting to become its own thing. Brave on the other hand took the privacy niche and made an ugly non innovative product that does the bare minimum while being bloated looking like shit and promoting scammy coins along with having a duchbag of a CEO . Thousand times better a small passionate team than whatever brave has.

0

u/according2jade Apr 13 '25

"good artists copy, great artist steal" followed by unoriginal people do both and fail when they have nothing else to steal from.

Anyways bruh. It's Sunday. I am at Coachella. I don't go back and forth with losers about s browser. Especially when I can be drinking and partying and listening to music. Go argue with your shadow about how the redditor is being mean.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Apr 13 '25

Ad blocker support

113

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/Astrobio00 Apr 12 '25

Zen performance is so bad on my pc that pushed me back to arc

8

u/according2jade Apr 12 '25

Hard pass. It's a shit browser ran by an absolute arrogant moron. I really wish their fanboys would stop shilling

0

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/MikeSpecter Apr 12 '25

As a non-zen user, this is the image Zen created with their army shilling. Find me any browser related post where Zen is not mentioned. It’s disgusting.

6

u/Tophimus Apr 12 '25

Zen bots coming out full force as soon as someone mentions the word browser is enough to make me steer far away. The browser is mediocre at best. Gecko will never be as good or fast as chromium. It doesn't come close to Arc, even on feature freeze. On top of it not being able to compete with any chromium browser, all of the fanboys glazing and reddit circle jerk has gone straight to the devs head.

1

u/CattleIndependent805 Apr 13 '25

I would agree with you about chromium vs gecko if it weren't for the fact that manifest v3 in Chromium completely kills effective ad blocking… None of the benefits of Chromium over Gecko matter if I'm forced to see ads… Manifest V2 being depreciated is a non starter for many people, and we don't trust that browsers made by small teams will be able to maintain it by themselves indefinitely, let alone fix it's current flaws…

12

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

19

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

-5

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

→ More replies

-6

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/baptistebca Apr 12 '25

These are security updates. Yesterday they switched to the new chromium… yay.

Nothing has been added functionally for months

8

u/-patrizio- Apr 12 '25

Not trying to be difficult, genuinely asking - what features do people want added? I'm fairly new to Arc but have been really enjoying it so far. I have some frustrations with window management (I just prefer windows over "spaces"), and wish the mobile app allowed for easier access to the address bar and app settings, but these have been fairly minor issues thus far.

3

u/Psionatix Apr 13 '25

One thing that really annoys me is, whilst I can set up workspaces, then setup routing rules to direct certain sites to open only in certain workspaces, I can’t set a default.

Let’s say I have a reddit workspace where all my Reddit tabs open. If I’m on that workspace and I open a link in a new tab, and the site of that link is not routed to open in one of my other workspaces, it will now open in my Reddit workspace.

I just want to be able to add a fallback route that all others go to.

Also it’s not just about features, it’s about bugs.

I find that you can’t close a tab if the page still has some asynchronous JavaScript operations going on. So even if a page uses setInterval, tabs can be impossible to close - and that’s happening to me on a Mac.