https://www.theverge.com/23462235/arc-web-browser-review
By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
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Arc’s sidebar is much more than a bunch of vertical tabs.
Switching to the Arc browser is hard. You should know that right up front. It’s not that it’s technically difficult: Arc has some simple tools for importing bookmarks, it runs the same underlying engine as Chrome, and the onboarding process is actually thoroughly delightful. It’s just that Arc, the new browser from a startup called The Browser Company, is such a divergent idea about how browsers should work that it takes some time, and some real effort, to get used to.
The Browser Company’s CEO, Josh Miller, talks a lot about operating systems and browsers. The difference is subtle but important. Browsers, traditionally, have mostly just tried to show you the web without getting in your way; they provide tabs and a URL bar and maybe a way to add extensions, but not much more. Operating systems, on the other hand, are deeply involved in how things work. Think of the way Siri and Apple Pay operate across apps on your iPhone or how Google’s Material You changes the look and feel of everything on your phone. Even the share menus or simple drag-and-drop between apps — that’s all operating system stuff.
Arc wants to be the web’s operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen.
Another way to think about it is that Arc treats the web the way TikTok treats video: not as a fixed thing for you to consume but as a set of endlessly remixable components for you to pull apart, play with, and use to create something of your own. Want something to look better or have an idea for what to do with it? Go for it.
Arc treats the web the way TikTok treats video: not as a fixed thing for you to consume but as a set of endlessly remixable components
This is a fun moment in the web browser industry. After more than a decade of total Chrome dominance, users are looking elsewhere for more features, more privacy, and better UI. Vivaldi has some really clever features; SigmaOS is also betting on browsers as operating systems; Brave has smart ideas about privacy; even Edge and Firefox are getting better fast. But Arc is the biggest swing of them all: an attempt to not just improve the browser but reinvent it entirely.
I’ve been using Arc intermittently for more than a year and as my default browser for the last several months. (Right now, Arc is only available for the Mac, but the company has said it’s also working on Windows and mobile versions, both due next year.) It’s still in a waitlisted beta and is still very much a beta app, with some basic features missing, other features still in flux, and a few deeply annoying bugs. But Arc’s big ideas are the right ones. I don’t know if The Browser Company is poised to take on giants and win the next generation of the browser wars, but I’d bet that the future of browsers looks a lot like Arc.
A screenshot of several browser spaces in Arc.
Spaces make it easy to switch contexts and even accounts inside of Arc. Image: Arc / David Pierce
The sidebar is the first thing you have to understand to really make sense of Arc. This is not vertical tabs for the sake of saving space on your ultrawide monitor; this is a totally different way of managing the stuff you’re seeing in your browser.