I wholeheartedly agree.

However, it’s hard to say that AT&T, Comcast, Cox and the like aren’t all doing the same thing.

Zen has the look and polish that makes it not feel like just another Firefox clone. It’s how I imagine people feel when using Microsoft Edge and Brave; there’s enough there to keep it perceptually separated from its Chrome base.

Floorp was great, but it didn’t bring much to the table that you couldn’t already tweak yourself with base Firefox. Heck, projects like firebuilder let you build something close with a couple CLI prompts.

I would never use it as a personal browser, mostly because I really only keep 2-5 tabs open at a time for personal stuff. However, Arc has been an absolute game changer for work. Just a couple of reasons:

• The way it blend tabs and favorites prevents you from accidentally having multiple tabs of the same site open (though you still can have multiple when you want)
• Workspaces have very little friction to them, and you can control whether they are sandboxed or not, which helps greatly manage my “hats” at work
• Lots of smart keyboard shortcut options make zipping through common tasks a breeze
• Their “Tidy Tabs” button uses an LLM to group similar tabs together, which is a lifesaver during big research sessions

I hope their monitization plans succeed, because I’d hate to see this browser die.