It’s a little early to be crowning ‘best-ofs’ perhaps, but I’m pretty confident that Arc, the up and coming web browser by The Browser Company (slightly pretentious name, but very descriptive) is going to be at the top of my list for my favorite app of 2023.
I’m calling it now.
Note: This post isn’t sponsored in any way; I just really, really love this browser.
Arc aims to calm the noise and chaos that can come with browsing the web today. It’s designed to be clean, minimalistic, and delightful. It’s full of great, well-considered features (some of which I’ll cover here), but the thing which really makes it a game-changer for me isn’t an extra feature or two, but in how these features are reimagined into a different browsing experience as a whole, seemingly designed just for me.
I’ve been using it daily for a little less than six months, and if Chrome implemented most of these features, I’m not sure I’d be tempted to switch back. Just to note: it’s currently only available for MacOS, but Mobile and Windows versions are both scheduled for release this year (they’re attempting to port Swift to windows to enable the bulk of the Mac codebase to be reused).
The core problem
If you’re anything like me, your Chrome probably looked something like this, or worse, at some point in the last few weeks. Maybe this article is one of those tabs.
Maybe you have a presentation coming up where you need to share your screen, so you drag a presentation into a new window to keep everything nice and clean. The next day realize you have two separate browser windows with many tabs open in each that are increasingly difficult to manage. Tabs and windows may stay open for weeks as you slowly fail to action things until something causes your computer to crash or restart.
You breathe a sigh of relief, as you open your browser, and see just your collection of pinned tabs, and the sweet, sweet emptiness of a fresh new browser window. No chaos (yet), and no tab anxiety.
This feeling of calm is the feeling I get whenever I look at Arc in the morning. Its small changes and delightful details compound. Let’s dive a little deeper into those details.
A new approach to tabs
The biggest mental shift (and the one I’ve seen the most people struggle with anecdotally) is that Arc’s tabs live exclusively in a left sidebar. It’s a bit strange to start with, and will need some muscle-memory adjustment, but in my opinion they have so many benefits once you get used to them. Many of the patterns here just wouldn’t make sense with top tabs.
Tab sidebars have never worked for me in the past. I’ve tried having the Start bar in Windows on the left, side docks in MacOS, side tabs in Opera, and they’ve all felt weird and bad (though I know some people swear by them). For probably a bunch of little reasons I’m not fully aware of, I didn’t have this problem with Arc. The structure of the tabs just made sense.
The tab bar is split into 3 sections. At the top, under the address bar, you have Favorites. These are icon-only tabs, like pinned tabs in Chrome. These are usually ever-present apps, things like Mail, Calendar, Todo apps, maybe Slack or Twitter, and are always present regardless of context.
The bulk of your tabs sit in an area called Today. One of the magical features that keeps Arc clean and tidy is an optional setting that clears unused tabs after a certain time period (usually every 12-24 hours). Things you need today, Google searches, browsing Product Hunt, or whatever you do, but perhaps not beyond. When they’re cleared overnight, you’re not that worried.
Between the two, you have Pinned tabs. Pinned tabs never get cleared, and support collapsable folders, so it’s a great place to store articles To read, or often-used things which are maybe specific to a space/context. All tabs can be renamed via a double-click, but this is especially useful for pinned tabs, allowing you to keep your browser workspace free of SEO cruft that fills website titles more often than not.
One really cool thing about pinned tabs is how they work when you start navigating within them. Let’s use my Medium pin as an example. I have my patner program dashboard pinned. I double-click the tab and rename it to “Medium”. This is now the “Home” of that particular pin. If I click to write a new post, or check my stats, or read another Medium article, they’ll continue to be in this pinned tab row, but you’ll notice a / to the left of the tab title. This acts like a breadcrumb, and if you click on the icon to the left of the / you can click back to the original pinned URL, the partner program dashboard in my case.
Split-screen
If you ever need to work on two things side by side, it’s as easy as dragging a tab next to your current tab in the main window. This will open two tabs side by side, and they’ll be displayed in a single tab row in the tab bar. The implementation is intuitive and easy, and really helps when you’re working with data and copying and pasting a bunch between apps.
I’ve also used it for taking notes in Notion in one pane, while watching a conference in another, for example.
Little Arc
One common cause of tab-congestion is clicking extremely temporary links from other apps. Say you use the Slack app for work, and someone wants you to quickly check something on a ticket. You open a JIRA link (or Linear if you’re a very lucky person), do a thing, maybe leave a comment, and don’t need the tab after that. You might just close the tab once you’re done, but more likely you forget at least half the time, and end up with a dozen JIRA tabs over a few days.
Little Arc is a lite version of Arc that doesn’t include tabs. It’s a single extremely minimal window that pops up when you open any external link, and from there you can either read or action something and dismiss the window, or make a conscious choice to open it in a specific space. This both keeps clutter out of your tabs, but also helps reduce work and personal stuff ending up intermingling in the same browser context. It’s been one of the best features for me by far.
Different spaces for each context
I’ve mentioned Spaces a couple of times already, so let me explain. To keep your tabs and workspaces in order, you can create sidebars just for a specific context. At the most simple setup you might have Work and Personal. Spaces have their own lists of Pinned and Today tabs, as well as custom color themes.
You might have Medium or Substack in a Writing space, but Booking.com and Seatguru in a Travel space, and use Little Arc to direct the right tabs to the right spaces.
You can also choose to split default accounts between spaces, so if you have a work Gmail and a personal Gmail, you can keep them entirely separate and logged into the correct one in the correct space.
Accessing these spaces can be done via keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+Number keys), or by clicking the icons at the bottom of the tab bar, but swiping two fingers on the trackpad left or right is really how it’s meant to be experienced. It feels smooooth.
Unified address bar
If you’ve ever used a quick-launcher like Alfred or Raycast, they’re basically a super-powered search bar that can launch apps, and perform a bunch of misc tasks. This is what Arc has turned their address bar into.
Hitting CMD+T opens a new tab, and immediately shows a Raycast-like search UI in the middle of the browser window. You can type a URL, search string, or any number of common browser actions. For example, you can search through and switch to open tabs, run browser extensions, switch between spaces, move a tab to a space, check release notes, create a new Figma document, or invite friends to Arc purely from this address bar. I can see them allowing extensions to this just like Raycast have, in the future.
Media
If you’re a chronic media multitasker, Arc has got your back. Videos will switch into a floating picture-in-picture window when you change tab. This mini-player has recently had an overhaul and can be playfully flicked to any corner with a drag or a trackpad gesture. It can be resized, paused or closed at any point. Not really a productivity booster, but a nice to have for personal browsing.
When playing, music from Bandcamp or other less-artist-friendly popular music players, a mini-player with media controls will show in the bottom left. Hovering will reveal the song details and allow you to dismiss it if you want to stop the track. You can have multiple of these players stacked from different sources.
The internet computer
So that’s the current state of Arc. There’s a few features I haven’t gone into detail on, such as Boosts, Easels, and Notes, but I think Easels and Notes need a lot of work to compete with established apps such as Notion, Miro, or FigJam. I’d rather just see tighter integration with those apps.
Arc’s ultimate vision is to create an “internet computer”, which I’ll let them explain further. The big question many have is, how are they going to make money? They’ve been transparent in their communication here, and said Arc as a browser will always be free.
They plan to build more collaborative features for teams over time, and monetize on team-specific features. They want browsing to become more collaborative and ‘multi-player’, and I expect we’ll see more of that direction experimented with once the basic browser experience is nailed down.
They’re a relatively small and transparent team, and seem well funded for the time being, so I’m not worried that the browser will disappear tomorrow.
For the time being, it’s very nice to finally have a better alternative to Brave.
I’ll leave invite links for Arc in the comments weekly through the end of January. There will be 5 invites available on each of my links per week so first-in-first-served. If you have a link, feel free to share it with folks here also.
Last batch!
https://arc.net/gift/ce61b6e2
First five invites: https://arc.net/gift/51b3ae7e