May 27, 2025 was probably one of the top 10 saddest days of the year for me. It was the day Arc announced they were stopping development. The blog post said "Please know this: we're not trying to shut Arc down" and like a kid whose parents say "we're separating but don't worry, everything will stay the same," I believed it.
But did it? Absolutely not.
To me Arc was about being able to customize fonts, themes, have spaces, live folders, route configurations where certain domains opened in specific spaces. It had live folders, pinned links for quick access- and made the browsing experience more organised. It had tab renaming, tab tidying through auto-grouping. Most of it technically still exists today, its just.. different? Is this a love letter to Arc? Maybe.
I tried sticking with it for 6 months. But Arc got bloated, memory management got bad, and the bugs got unbearable. There was this one bug where I'd hover over a tab, get the "double-click to rename" prompt, close the sidebar and it would just stay there. That was the thing that finally pushed me out.
So I went looking. I couldn't expect everything so I kept my requirements short - customisation, profiles, vertical tabs.
The Ones That Didn't Work Out
First stop was Dia, Arc's own successor. Obviously. It has profiles and vertical tabs but the customisation felt really limited, just a handful of color presets. And when I hit Cmd+Q to close a space it closed all of them. That was enough to not satisfy the requirements I started with, so I moved on.
I tried Orion, Opera GX, Zen. Either too buggy, too niche, or just not quite there. I tried going back to Chrome and I just couldn't do it after Arc. Eventually I gave up and landed on Safari for a bit. Stable, fast, fine.
Okay Drumroll 🥁
The browser I landed on is one I'd actually tried years ago and written off. I genuinely don't think you'll guess it.
Firefox
I know! But hear me out because Firefox today is really not the Firefox you remember.
Why It Actually Works
It's been around forever, quietly improving while everyone was distracted by Chrome. Here's what actually won me over.
When I opened it I instantly felt like something was different. The UI felt so much better than what it was years before. Everything felt more fun. Just look at the profile opening screen - it's genuinely delightful. This already felt more promising than anything else I'd tried.
Profiles work the way you'd want them to - separate themes, separate extensions, separate sessions, all properly isolated. Firefox even introduced the option to use vertical tabs.
Then there's Firefox Color, which is where the customisation really opens up. It's a Mozilla extension that lets you theme basically every part of the browser - toolbar, tabs, background, text, popups.
Firefox also allows you to override fonts in the websites which is another layer to customization, similar to what Arc provided, although Arc provided limited fonts in "Boosts" and this is more granular control.
Its only been 4 days since I began using it, and it seems good so far. It even handles the command Q to quit a profile that Dia wasnt handling.
What's Still Missing
Its not a perfect replacement for sure.
Some features from Arc don't have clear equivalents in Firefox yet: automatic tab tidying (grouping and archiving), tab renaming, screen sharing as a pinned tab, routing links to spaces and live folders.
It's only been a few days, but so far it's been good. And since Firefox is open source, I'm already thinking about building an extension for at least some of these. I'll follow up if I do - so follow me if you want to hear how that goes. If I missed anything, and you know any alternate browser, or an extension that might help, let me know in the comments.
Leaving you with a bunch of screenshots of my customised my profiles:
Until next time 👋
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