Launched this week
Zigzag Browser
The polished, native Mac browser for life after Arc
128 followers
The polished, native Mac browser for life after Arc
128 followers
A native Mac browser for people leaving Arc, with the sidebar and spaces you're used to. Built on WebKit, not Chromium, and that's the point: the whole app is 18 MB (Arc is 871). Switching takes a minute. One import brings over everything, so you're already logged in. Colored spaces you swipe between, split view, peek, Chrome extensions like 1Password and Tampermonkey, and ad blocking built-in Open source, no account, no AI. Nobody can shut it down.
Free
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Thank you all for trying Zigzag today, and for every comment and bug report. It's been a wild first day!
A fairly big update is already in the works: Bitwarden's inline autofill, Violentmonkey, a smarter Clear that only closes the tabs you've drifted away from, ⌘-number hints, much faster History search, and background tabs that sleep when they burn energy.
Heads up: I'm in China, so I'm on a different clock from most of you, and I have school and exams coming up. Replies might take a few hours instead of minutes, but please keep the feedback coming. I read every comment and I'll get to each one 🙏
Does the import pull Chrome tabs into spaces, or only Arc spaces?
@desktopentree Hey Joe! From Arc, the import brings your spaces, pinned tabs and favorites over as they are. From Chrome it brings bookmarks, history, passwords and your sign-ins (so you stay logged in to sites), but not your open tabs or tab groups, since Chrome doesn't have spaces to map them to. If you use several Chrome profiles, you can import each one separately, which works nicely as a starting point for separate spaces. Thank you for your interest in Zigzag!
As a Mac user, a native Swift/WebKit browser at 18 MB is exactly the trade-off I want over another Chromium wrapper — the sidebar and spaces are the Arc workflow I keep coming back to. The one-step Arc import makes it a low-risk try. Curious how it holds up with a lot of tabs open over a full workday, since that's where heavier browsers usually start to drag.
@jcbuilds Thanks, that's exactly the trade-off I was going for. Lots of tabs over a full day is something I've been working on directly. Someone here had 67 tabs open, which drove a few changes in the next update (0.7.0, out very soon): busy background tabs get put to sleep on their own so they stop eating CPU, and Clear closes the tabs you've drifted away from while keeping the ones you're working with. If it starts to drag for you, let me know what sites you had open and I'll look into it.
@jcbuilds Following up: 0.7.0 is out with that in mind. Busy background tabs now go to sleep on their own, and Clear closes the tabs you've drifted away from while keeping the ones you're working with. Would love to hear how a full workday goes.
Zigzag 0.7.0 is out, built almost entirely from your comments over the last two days. Thank you!
- Mini window: ⌃⌘N opens a small window for one quick page, and one click moves it into your main window without reloading. You can also have links from other apps open there, like Arc's Little Arc (thanks Philip).
- Space switcher: ⌥⌘S lists your spaces. Pick one with the arrow keys and press Return.
- Control+Tab works properly now: it was being swallowed whenever a page had the focus.
- Proxy extensions like FoxyProxy, and ChatGPT search as your search engine (thanks Harry).
- New tabs open right next to the one you're on.
- Clear keeps the tabs you're working with and closes the ones you've drifted away from.
- Busy background tabs go to sleep on their own to save battery.
Updates install automatically, or grab it at zigzagbrowser.com. Full notes: zigzagbrowser.com/release-notes
@madalina_barbu Thank you so much, Madalina! 🙏 If you give Zigzag a try, I'd love to hear what you think, the honest kind especially.
one-step Arc import plus an 18 MB install is a pretty easy first try. does split view stay inside the same colored space, or can the two pages belong to different ones?
@neerajnathany Thanks Neeraj! A split view lives inside one space. Both pages belong to the space you're in, and it keeps that space's color. You can still pair pages from two spaces: if you split with a tab from another space, Zigzag moves that tab into your current space so the pair stays together. Each space can keep its own splits, and you can also pin a split so it's there every time you come back.
Eighteen megabytes on WebKit instead of another Chromium wrapper is the detail that sold me, because the thing that finally pushed me off Arc was how much memory it ate just sitting there.
@karimbenkeroum Thanks Kareem! That was the whole point for me too. Zigzag uses the WebKit that's already part of macOS instead of shipping its own copy of Chromium, so the download stays small, and idle memory sits much closer to Safari than to Arc. Tabs you haven't touched in a while also go to sleep on their own. If you do try it, I'd love to hear how it compares on your Mac.