Vivaldi vs Arc on Mac in 2026 (Power-User Browser Showdown)

By Kshetez Vinayak, founder of SupaSidebar. Last updated June 8, 2026.

TL;DR:

In 2026, Vivaldi is the better long-term pick for Mac power users who want a browser that is still actively built. Arc entered maintenance mode in May 2025, so it gets Chromium security patches but no new features. Arc still has the cleaner, calmer interface (Spaces, the command bar, Little Arc), and it remains pleasant to use day to day. Vivaldi is heavier and busier but adds more every release: two-level tab stacks, full Workspaces, a built-in Mail/Calendar/Feed reader, mouse gestures, and command chains. The honest 2026 answer for an Arc refugee: Vivaldi is the closest power-user replacement that has a future, but it is a steeper learning curve. If Vivaldi feels overwhelming and the part of Arc that is missed is the clean sidebar, that sidebar can be added on top of any browser without a full migration.

Looking for something more specific?

• Comparing every Mac browser? -> Best Browser for Mac in 2026
• Want a Vivaldi review on its own? -> Vivaldi Browser Mac Review 2026
• Vivaldi vs Opera instead? -> Opera vs Vivaldi 2026
• Ready to leave Arc entirely? -> Arc Browser Alternative Guide

Vivaldi vs Arc on Mac: the 30-second verdict

Vivaldi and Arc both market themselves to the same person: the Mac user who wants more control over the browser than Chrome or Safari give. They take opposite routes to get there. Arc strips the interface down to a quiet sidebar and hides complexity. Vivaldi exposes everything and lets the user assemble the browser piece by piece.

The decisive fact in 2026 is development status. Arc entered maintenance mode on May 27, 2025, when its maker, The Browser Company, announced it was shifting focus to a new AI browser called Dia. Arc still receives Chromium security updates, so it is safe to use, but it gets no new features. Vivaldi ships meaningful updates on a regular cadence and is run by a founder-led independent company in Norway.

So the verdict splits cleanly. For the next year, Arc is the more comfortable browser to use right now. For the next five years, Vivaldi is the safer place to invest a workflow. Most power users evaluating this switch are not choosing between two equals; they are choosing between a frozen favorite and an actively maintained alternative.

This post covers the practical Vivaldi-vs-Arc tradeoffs on macOS 14+ for customization, tab management, performance, and the migration path for Arc users. It does not cover Windows or Linux (Arc on Windows is also frozen, and Vivaldi runs on both but this is a Mac comparison), and it does not relitigate whether Arc is dead in general terms; the full status breakdown covers that.

Vivaldi vs Arc on Mac: side-by-side comparison

The head-to-head on the dimensions Mac power users actually care about in 2026. Engine and feature claims are verified against each vendor's documentation and current Mac builds.

Two rows decide most of this comparison. "Receiving new features" is the strategic one: Arc's column is a hard no. "Learning curve" is the daily-experience one: Arc wins because its whole design philosophy is to hide complexity, while Vivaldi's is to expose it. Everything else is a question of which power-user features matter to a specific workflow.

Customization: Vivaldi's home turf

Vivaldi is the most customizable mainstream browser shipping in 2026, and it is not close. Themes can be scheduled by time of day. The toolbar, address bar, tab bar, and status bar can each be repositioned or hidden. Mouse gestures let a flick of the cursor close a tab or reopen the last one. Command chains let a user bundle several actions into one custom shortcut, like "close all tabs to the right, then open a new tab in a specific workspace." Keyboard shortcuts are fully remappable.

Arc takes the opposite stance. Arc's customization is curated, not open. The sidebar can be themed with a color gradient per Space, the toolbar is minimal by design, and Boosts allow per-site CSS and JavaScript injection (hide a paywall element, recolor a site, remove a sidebar). Boosts are genuinely powerful and Vivaldi has no direct equivalent, but Arc's overall philosophy is that the browser should make most decisions for the user.

The practical read: a power user who enjoys tuning every detail will hit a ceiling in Arc fast and never hit one in Vivaldi. A power user who wants a clean browser that already made good decisions will find Vivaldi's settings depth exhausting. Reddit threads in r/vivaldibrowser reflect this split. One thread praising Vivaldi called it "the most customizable powerful web browser I ever used," while former Arc users repeatedly describe missing how little they had to configure.

Tab management: two different philosophies

Arc's tab model is the reason most people tried it. Tabs live in a vertical sidebar, auto-archive after a set period (12 hours, a day, a week), and are organized into Spaces. Pinned tabs persist; everything else is treated as disposable. The effect is a browser that cleans up after the user automatically. Little Arc opens links in a temporary floating window so a quick click does not pollute the main tab list.

Vivaldi's tab model is built for users who want to keep and organize tabs, not auto-discard them. Two-level tab stacks let tabs nest inside other tabs, so a research session can collapse into a single parent tab. Tab tiling splits two, three, or four tabs into a single view (Arc had this too, but it is now frozen). Workspaces hold entire sessions, similar to Arc's Spaces but with more manual control. Nothing auto-archives unless a rule is set up.

Neither approach is wrong; they suit different brains. Arc suits someone who wants the browser to forget tabs for them. Vivaldi suits someone who wants to keep tabs and impose structure on them. The migration friction is real here: an Arc user who relied on auto-archiving will find Vivaldi keeps everything, and a Vivaldi user trying Arc will find their carefully stacked tabs disappearing on a timer.

A pattern shows up across r/ArcBrowser and r/vivaldibrowser threads in the past year: the tab system is the single hardest thing to give up when switching either direction. This is also where a cross-browser sidebar matters, because the one constant for multi-browser Mac users is that tabs scatter across whichever browsers they keep open. SupaSidebar shows live tabs from Vivaldi, Arc, Safari, Chrome, and 25+ browsers in total in one place, so the tab pile is visible and searchable regardless of which browser's tab model is in use.

Performance on Apple Silicon

Both browsers are Chromium-based and both ship native Apple Silicon (arm64) builds, so raw page-rendering speed is close. The differences are in resource footprint and how each browser behaves under a heavy tab load.

Arc, in its frozen state, is well-optimized but no longer being tuned for newer chips or macOS releases. It remains light in normal use, and its auto-archiving means idle tabs get discarded rather than holding memory. Vivaldi is heavier at idle because of its built-in Mail, Calendar, and Feed reader, all of which run as part of the browser. A Vivaldi user who does not use those tools can disable them to reclaim memory, which is worth doing on a fanless MacBook Air.

For users who care primarily about battery and RAM rather than features, the comparison shifts. Neither of these is the most battery-efficient browser on a Mac (Safari holds that title), and the dedicated battery comparison covers the full ranking with powermetrics numbers. The short version for this pair: Arc is lighter at idle, Vivaldi is heavier but configurable, and both are mid-pack against Safari.

A note on longevity: maintenance mode means Arc will not get the per-chip optimizations that future Apple Silicon generations (M5 and beyond) may benefit from. Vivaldi will. Over a multi-year horizon, that gap widens.

What Arc refugees actually lose by switching to Vivaldi

Honesty matters more than salesmanship here. An Arc user moving to Vivaldi gives up real things:

The clean, minimal interface. Arc's defining quality is how calm it feels. Vivaldi can be configured toward minimalism, but its defaults are dense, and the effort to strip it down is itself a project.

Boosts. Vivaldi has no per-site CSS/JS injection feature. A user who recolored sites or hid elements with Boosts will need a userstyles extension instead, which is clunkier.

Little Arc. Vivaldi has no exact equivalent of the floating temporary-tab window. Links open as normal tabs.

Easels and the AI-named tabs. These Arc niceties have no Vivaldi parallel.

What an Arc user gains is also real: an actively developed browser, deeper customization, built-in productivity tools, and no anxiety about the browser being abandoned. The trade is comfort-now for future-proofing.

There is a third path that does not require choosing. The single feature most Arc users say they miss is the sidebar itself, the clean vertical list of tabs and pinned items. That pattern does not have to be tied to one browser. SupaSidebar is a macOS app that adds an Arc-style sidebar on top of any browser, so an Arc user who finds Vivaldi overwhelming can keep using a simpler browser (or even Vivaldi) and get the sidebar feel back without learning Vivaldi's full settings tree.

The cross-browser reality most power users live in

Here is the part both vendors gloss over. Very few Mac power users run a single browser. The typical setup is one browser for work (often Chrome, because that is where company SSO is configured), Safari for anything that needs to sync to an iPhone, and a power-user browser like Vivaldi or Arc for everything else. Picking Vivaldi over Arc does not solve the scatter; it just changes which browser the third pile of tabs lives in.

This is the gap SupaSidebar was built to close. It is not a browser and not a browser extension. It is a native Mac app that brings Arc's sidebar to every browser, with one sidebar for tabs, bookmarks, files, and apps across Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, Zen, Vivaldi, Brave, Helium, and Dia (25+ browsers in total). Live Tabs shows everything open across all of them, the Command Panel (⌘⌃K) searches across every browser at once, and Air Traffic Control can route links so a Figma link always opens in Chrome Work while a personal link opens in Safari.

For an Arc user specifically, there is one more detail worth knowing: SupaSidebar imports an Arc setup in three clicks (Preferences, then Import and Export, then Arc, then Import), so the Spaces and pinned items built up in Arc carry over rather than being rebuilt by hand.

Picking what to use

For Mac power users in 2026, the choice between Vivaldi and Arc comes down to time horizon and tolerance for complexity. Vivaldi is the recommendation for anyone who wants a browser that will keep improving and does not mind a steep setup; it is the closest actively-developed match to what Arc offered. Arc remains a fine choice for the next year for users who value its calm interface above all and accept that it is frozen.

Single-browser users who loved Arc's minimalism and want it to last: switch to Vivaldi and budget an afternoon to configure it, or stay on Arc short-term while watching whether Dia matures. Users who find Vivaldi too heavy but miss Arc's sidebar: keep a lighter browser and add the sidebar back on top with a dedicated app. Multi-browser users (the majority): pick whichever browser fits best, then unify tabs across all of them so the choice of primary browser matters less. The browser you pick is the front end; the tab pile is the real problem, and that lives across all of them at once.

Try SupaSidebar (free tier) if the part of Arc you miss most is the sidebar and you would rather not rebuild your whole workflow inside Vivaldi.

Why SupaSidebar fits this comparison

SupaSidebar is a macOS app that brings Arc's sidebar to every browser, one sidebar for tabs, bookmarks, files, and apps across 25+ browsers including Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, Zen, Vivaldi, Brave, Helium, and Dia. For the Vivaldi-vs-Arc decision specifically, it removes the pressure of the choice: an Arc user who wants the sidebar but not Vivaldi's complexity can keep a simpler browser, and a Vivaldi user who wants their Arc tabs and pins carried over can import them in three clicks. It works alongside whichever browser wins, rather than asking the user to commit to one.

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Written by Kshetez Vinayak, founder of SupaSidebar.