Arc is quietly changing how we use the internet
When you think of internet browsers, the word that comes to you first is probably not ‘innovative’. I’ve tried most mainstream browsers, and the only few ‘wow’ features that I can recall from the days of Internet Explorer through to the present are tabs & extensions.
Extensions like Honey changed how we shopped, and ad blockers like ublock started an arms race between developers on both sides in the eternal fight for balance of a non-intrusive user experience, and revenue.
For more than a decade, the majority of new browsers that come into existence are something I coin as ‘Chrome — but’. Brave, a browser that I regularly use is ‘Chrome — but privacy focused’. Another, Shift is ‘Chrome– but web apps’, or Edge’s, ‘Chrome – but Microsoft & now, Copilot’. All of these browsers are great at what they focus on, and diverge from the vanilla Chrome experience, but the way you interact with the internet its fundamentally the same as it has always been, and seemingly, as it always will be.
That is, until The Browser Company came onto the scene and disrupted what we thought a browser was, with Arc.
Switching to Arc in 2023
The first time I ran Arc back in March of 2023, I immediately felt that this was going to change how I used the internet with two killer features, Spaces and, at least what I call it anyway, Daily tabs.
Spaces
Spaces is Arcs take on what we knew as ‘Profiles’. Profiles seperate your browsing activity, bookmarks, tabs and cookies so that you can fragment your digital experience between work & play. Now where profiles typically suffers, is that it’s not integrated well, its stashed off into a corner and forgotten about.
Spaces is fundamentally the same, there isn’t a reinvention of the wheel on ‘what’ it does, it’s all focused on the ‘how’. Spaces are integrated into the sidebar, you can switch between them effortlessly and each one is visually distinct and customisable so you always know where you are. Alongside its friendly design, the onboarding for Spaces allows Arc to take a historically power-user-esque feature, and made it accessible and intuitive to the masses.
Daily tabs
Tabs revolutionised how I used a browser, I went from trawling through a sea of open windows through to having every seperate page contained in it’s own tab. As I scoured my new row of open tabs, flicking between content and seeing where I wanted to navigate to was a breeze.
This introduced a new issue, I had migrated my issue of ‘too many windows’, to ‘too many tabs’. Now I admit, there are ways to handle this that involve some self-policing on my end:
- Use bookmarks
- Make the call and close tabs the I’m no longer using, instead of keeping them open ‘just in case’
- Stop treating tabs like a reading list, where I keep them open because ‘I’d like to read that later’ or, ‘These tabs are good for my lawn project’
Daily tabs was the bad cop I never knew I needed. Sometimes you just need to elegantly force a user into new behaviour, combatting their laziness to provide a better user experience.
At the end of the day, any of your tabs that aren’t pinned, expire. Poof! Gone. You start every day with Arc, fresh. Need to bring them back? They are stashed and easily retrievable — but honestly, I’ve probably needed to do that only once or twice because this feature has made me a better user.
Starred pages, Bookmarks, Reading Lists all viable options for me in the past with other browsers — but for whatever reason, I never could consistently use them. It was always easier, to leave a vast sea of tabs open forever.
I never expected that having a browser wipe out my tabs, was actually the stick I needed, and together with the carrot (Easels, Pins & Spaces) it all just works.
Arc, at the start of 2024
The Browser Company is fast, like, lightning fast. Arc gets updates a few times a week, a mix of enhancements and new features drop all the time, and I always click that toast notification with the excitement of unwrapping a gift on Christmas morning. (They also have some of the best release notes & videos, I’ve ever seen)
The biggest thing over the past year? AI. Arc has invested into AI and delivered a number of features that either improve how we browse the web, down to overhauling it completely. Arc’s latest feature drop, is so disruptive, it has me challenging all of my perceptions on how we interact with the web.
Shipping at the tail end of 2023, Arc Max delivered a lot of GPT-like features and looks to be the container for all future AI-esque development of the Arc browser. Users are offered the control to enable or disable these features, for a more conventional browsing experience.
5 second previews
Hovering over a link generates a summarised preview of the page, without even clicking the link.
Ask on page
Hold down Command + F on any page to ask a question and let Max answer it for you in seconds.
ChatGPT
It wouldn’t be 2023 without ChatGPT somewhere. You can start typing “ChatGPT” into the Command Bar, hit Tab, and get answers to your questions in fewer clicks.
Max answering a question on page
Tidy titles & downloads
Arc automatically renames your tabs and downloaded files to something more scannable. For example, an Airbnb tab titled:
Airbnb: Biking to The Ancient Tree of El Tule, is simply renamed to, Biking to El Tule. It’s all the context you need, and avoids the prolific truncation we’ve been encumbered with for years with tabs.
Tidy downloads is much the same, but for your downloaded files — keeping your downloads folder clean & accessible, yes please.
As of today, Arc just dropped a few new upcoming features — these are biggies, and the folks at The Browser Company feel it too, lovingly calling it Arc’s Act II.
Instant links
Instant links skip the middleman. Today, you know what you are looking for, you type it into your search bar and your default search engine of choice pops up, probably littered with ads and sponsored posts. You scroll down to get the content you want, and *click*. Let’s just skip all of that.
As Arks co-founder, Josh Miller puts it,
“You go and tell Arc what you’re looking for, and we’ll go grab it for you”
Arc Explore
What I could only describe as automated & conversational browsing. Give Arc Explore a task, and it will go ahead and scour the web and do the heavy lifting for you.
In the example we’re shown on the video, Josh & team ask Explore for a restaurant booking for select few local restaurants. Explore comes back with the results, and reservation availability. Clicking either card will load the reservations page, all pre-filled.
Better yet, its conversational — you can continue with a thread, akin to ChatGPT and Arc’s own, Ask on Page. In this example, the team are questions about the cuisine, and eventually, to how to make one of the dishes at home. Arc Explore breaks down the ingredients, recipes and even videos of how to cook the dish.
Choosing a recipe was a great use case example, as these websites are typically the worst with SEO junk, ads, pop-ups and various anti-user dark patterns. Arc Explore delivers all that content, and more, on a single, purposeful page. Wow.
Browse for me
Think of all the questions you pump into Google every day, from ‘how does X work’ to, ‘tell me about the history of Y’. Today, you’ll open a few pages, scroll through, trawl through the content and hopefully, leave with the answer you were searching for and go about your day.
‘Browse for me’ does just that, it does all the heavy lifting for you and leaves you with a custom built page, specifically to answer your question after compiling information from multiple websites.
Live folders
Okay, so no AI for this one. ‘Live folders’ continues on the vein of browsing for you, by anticipating what you’ll need. It looks like uou can set up a new type of ‘Live folder’ which will be populated automatically by Arc with relevent tabs. Some use cases as described by The Browser Company:
- Webapp notifications: In this case development software, Linear, is a Live Folder. As you are tagged on tickets, tabs open up creating a “much, more dynamic feed of bringing the internet to you”
- Blogs: Arc will know blogs that you enjoy, and add it to your sidebar, this Live folder will create tabs as new content is published.
- News: When there’s a story about something you want to read about, in the example they use any news that comes up about Arc, it creates a new tab with any relevant article. Think, Google Alerts for this one.
With the first month of 2024 closed, Arc has burst out of the gates with these updates that fundamentally challenge how we interact with the internet. They are asking some novel questions, ‘What if the browser is us, and not the user?’
I’m excited for what this year brings both in terms of The Browser Company & Arc, but also how competitors will respond (it won’t be the first time Arc has *influenced* some development pivots).
It also starts some new threads, while ChatGPT scraped the web and offered snippets of information that could arguably take that same traffic away from Google, Bing and other search providers. It’s always been self contained in a conversational chat app. Arc has taken that same use case, and put it front and centre, using that data to create bespoke content that not only answers the question to an insanely polished degree, but also skips the search engine goliath’s. Will we soon be at a point where tapping Enter on a search bar doesn’t load a search engine?
—
Buckle up, Arc just cracked open Pandora’s Box.
