Zen Browser is heavily inspired by Arc Browser, with one core difference. It was built for those who want a Chromium alternative, but love the idea of a modern browser with a powerful sidebar, like Arc.

That said, with it being built atop Firefox, if you're moving over to it from Google Chrome or Safari, you're most notably going to notice how many browser extensions you use that don't exist in Firefox more than anything:

Only 2 of 29 extensions ported over

It's also built by a much smaller team, so you really have to just be somebody that absolutely loves Firefox, and wants to use a modern spin on that. That said, if youwant an Arc-like experience without the bugs? Just use Arc instead.

Opera has managed to stay about as relevant in the browser space as Firefox, which is just a tad bit behind that of Microsoft Edge.

Interestingly enough, unlike most other major browsers on the market, Opera is actually a publicly traded company with about a $1B market cap. This is particularly interesting because it means that they need to focus on growing revenue as they have investors.

In their attempt to stay relevant, they have copied many features from the more modern browsers on the market like Arc Browser (e.g. Spaces and Folders).

You can tell Arc has been influencing the browser market. They expanded the idea of browser profiles into Spaces, and now Opera has copied the concept with Workspaces. The switching animation is slick and you can create as many workspaces as you'd like, but they all share the same cookies and cache, so you cannot fully separate environments like personal and work accounts. That separation is the key difference between Arc's Spaces and Opera's Workspaces.

You can create groups of tabs in the top if you want similar sites to be together for easy expanding/collapsing. If you open up 2 or more of the sam site, it'll automatically create a tab group for that site.

Opera has been called out a bit lately for being owned by a Chinese company, and for making most of its revenue from Ads, meaning they very well are tracking, storing, and selling details about how you're using the browser.

While tempting and seemingly impressive, there's just something in the heavy influencer marketing push and security concerns that make us have a bit of pause in actually using Opera as our daily driver.