Switch From Arc to Chrome: The 5-Minute Migration (2026)

Key takeaways

• Arc is in maintenance mode, not dead. Atlassian closed its $610M deal on October 21, 2025; Arc still gets security patches but no features.
• Your data moves cleanly. Bookmarks export as HTML, extensions reinstall from the same Web Store, Google sign-in restores passwords and history.
• Two things need rebuilding by hand: Arc Spaces (flatten to bookmark folders in Chrome) and the command-bar workflow. A workspaces extension restores both.

You exported your Arc bookmarks, opened Chrome, and the first thing you noticed was that your Spaces were gone. Not broken. Gone. Twelve carefully separated contexts collapsed into one long bookmark folder. The good news: the actual migration takes about five minutes, almost everything transfers, and the two things that do not transfer are both recoverable. This walks the whole move, in order, with the gaps named honestly.

Step 1: Export Your Arc Bookmarks

Open Arc, go to the File menu, and choose Export Bookmarks. Arc writes a standard bookmarks.html file, the same format every Chromium browser reads. Save it somewhere you can find it, like your Desktop.

One thing to know before you click: Arc’s Spaces do not survive this export as Spaces. Arc stores its sidebar layout in a separate internal file (StorableSidebar.json on macOS), and the bookmark export only captures the URLs, not the Space boundaries. So your Work, Personal, and Research spaces all land in the HTML file as ordinary nested folders. They keep their names. They lose their isolation.

That is fine for now. Get the URLs into Chrome first, then rebuild the structure in Step 4.

Step 2: Import Into Chrome

In Chrome, open the three-dot menu, then Bookmarks and lists, then Import bookmarks and settings. Pick Bookmarks HTML File from the dropdown, select the file you just exported, and confirm.

Chrome drops everything into a folder usually called “Imported” inside your bookmarks bar. Every URL from every Arc Space is now in Chrome. Nothing is lost. The folders are flat and unswitchable, but the data is intact and that is the part that mattered to protect.

If you used a Google account in Arc (Arc supported Chrome sign-in), your saved passwords and history may already be in Chrome the moment you sign in with the same account. Check Settings, Autofill and passwords before you assume you need to re-enter anything.

Step 3: Reinstall Your Extensions

Arc is built on Chromium. Every extension you ran in Arc came from the Chrome Web Store and installs in Chrome unchanged. There is no conversion step.

The fastest way to rebuild your set: open Arc’s extensions page (arc://extensions), note what you had enabled, then install the same items from the Web Store in Chrome. If you synced extensions through a Google account, some may reinstall automatically on sign-in. This is the step where staying inside the Chromium family pays off. A move to Zen or any Firefox-based browser would mean abandoning this entire list, because Chrome extensions do not run in Firefox.

Step 4: Rebuild Spaces as Switchable Workspaces

This is where the migration stops being a copy job. Chrome has no native Space. Tab Groups look similar but share one tab strip: every group’s tabs stay visible at once, so there is no context isolation and no key to flip from Work mode to Personal mode.

To get the actual Arc Spaces behavior back (switch context and the previous space’s tabs vanish from view), you add named workspaces through an extension. SuperchargeNavigation (v1.3.0, free, no account) is the direct equivalent. Create one workspace per Arc Space you had, open the relevant tabs in each, and switching between them swaps the entire tab context the way Arc did. Your imported bookmark folders from Step 2 become the seed list: open a folder’s links inside its matching workspace and you have reconstructed that Space.

Each workspace holds its tabs independently. Switching hides the previous workspace’s tabs entirely rather than filtering a shared list. Sessions persist across Chrome restarts, and a snapshot of your layout saves automatically every 5 minutes (up to 50 rolling saves, roughly the last four hours), so an accidental close is recoverable from a time-travel slider.

Step 5: Restore Your Command-Bar and Sidebar Muscle Memory

The last thing that does not transfer is the part you used most without thinking: the keyboard workflow. Arc’s Command Bar (Cmd+T) searched open tabs, history, and actions from one bar. Chrome’s address bar searches URLs and history but cannot jump between your open tabs the same way.

SuperchargeNavigation maps that to Alt+K: a keyboard-first command bar that filters open tabs, history, and bookmarks. Type to narrow, arrow keys to move, Enter to open. If you built Arc reflexes around never touching the mouse to switch tabs, this is where they come back. The deeper keyboard layer goes further with a hint mode that overlays letter badges on links so you can follow them by keystroke, covered in the Arc command bar replacement guide.

For the sidebar itself: Chrome 146 ships native vertical tabs in a left rail, which restores the Arc tab-list look with no extension. The extension’s side panel adds what native vertical tabs leave out — the workspace switcher, multi-select bulk actions on tabs, and Alt+Click peek previews that float a link’s destination in an overlay without committing it to a tab, the way Arc’s Glance worked.

What Transfers, What You Rebuild

Little Arc is the one feature with no Chrome path at all. The transient mini-window for a quick lookup that never touches your main tabs does not map onto Chrome’s extension surface. If that was central to how you worked, it is the single thing you will miss.

Why Arc Forced This in the First Place

Arc is not broken. It still runs, and it still gets Chromium security patches. The latest macOS build was v1.147.1, released May 22, 2026. What it does not get is a future. The Browser Company moved Arc to maintenance mode in May 2025 and shifted to Dia, an AI-first browser. Atlassian announced its acquisition of The Browser Company in September 2025 and closed the $610M deal on October 21, 2025 (about eight months before this article’s June 2026 publication). No new Arc features have shipped since, and no sunset date has been announced.

So the calculus for a daily Arc user is not “my browser died today.” It is “my browser stopped moving, and the team is elsewhere.” Staying means betting on a frozen product. Moving to Chrome means a known platform with active development and the extension ecosystem you already depend on. For a fuller feature-by-feature map of what carries over, see replicating Arc’s features in Chrome.

If You Are Deciding Between Chrome, Zen, and Dia

If your priority is keeping your Chrome extensions and logins with minimal disruption, migrate to Chrome and add a workspaces extension — that is this guide.

If you want an Arc-like browser more than you want your extension set, Zen is actively developed and closely mirrors Arc’s design, but it is Firefox-based, so your Chrome extensions stop working the moment you switch. That trade-off is the whole decision.

If you were drawn to where The Browser Company is heading rather than to Arc’s tab model, Dia is their current product — but it is an AI-first tool, macOS and Apple Silicon only, and not a workspace-and-tabs replacement. It answers a different question than the one Arc answered.

Leaving Arc usually comes down to one factor: the extension library. If that is yours, Chrome is the move, and the five steps above are the whole migration.