Arc does some things right. Combining tabs and bookmarks into one cohesive display, that allows the moving of one to the other, makes sense. Having a floating command bar that does more than just "open this URL" as well.
Others have tried to solve the intersection of new discoveries and daily reading workflows, but only Arc seems to present the latter in a way that does not get in the way of the former and does not require N keypresses to get there.
Sidebar plus floating URL bar means much less window chrome, which is (especially for people like me who haven't owned a monitor or a desktop PC for a decade) a welcome freeing experience that maximizes screen estate.
Having a baked in tracker stripper for a one-keypress URL copy is, especially for people like me who copy dozens of URL daily, a boon. No other browser seems to think, that this is something that is needed. And most users seem to have arranged themselves with two keystrokes to highlight the URL bar and copying the contents, followed by dozens of deletes to remove trackers.
Sure, it's small stuff and easily waved off, but if none of the other browsers wants to break with the Netscape early days paradigms, Arc it is[1].
[1] Zen Browser tries, but then, that Mozilla underpinning often sabotages the experience.
> Combining tabs and bookmarks into one cohesive display, that allows the moving of one to the other
While I haven't used arc and don't have experience how that feature feels, I think the over 20 year old concept of a bookmarks menu, and tabs, as separate things is the best and never needed solving, and any attempt be different is worse than the original (like android firefox and its 'collections'. Why? Or Linux file managers hiding bookmarks different locations that operate differently called "Go", "Places" and actual "Bookmarks" that change through versions and sometimes coexist for some reason so you never know which menu it's going to be this time)
> Combining tabs and bookmarks into one cohesive display
I've tried to experiment with different ways to present browsing information. One approach is to present the tabs, bookmarks, and history on one open cohesive page, and allows searching all of them at once. Of course the devils are in the details, how to effectively navigate to different sections of the page, how to make sure performance is good, etc. I made a browser extension to try out the idea [1].
Firefox also has a "Copy without URL tracking" option in the URL bar context menu. It's not one-keypress, but clearly a tracker stripper is not Arc-exclusive.
Also no idea what you are talking about with Zen's "Mozilla underpinning sabotaging the experience".
Nowhere on their site (that I can find) do they mention that. There's lots of sales talk about it does all the work and adapts, etc., but nothing about what it actually does.
I can't see a reason to change browsers. What are the features that Arc has that other browsers don't have?
Their sales pitch is the problem they need to solve.
The reason I'm not interested in arc Arc is that its not open source, not even source-available. It may not be hostile to me right now, but the existing browsers that I use definitely aren't (ungoogled-chromium, firefox) and if that changes, well, I have their source code. Figuring out how to switch my workflow to a new browser isn't effortless, either.
Source availability doesn't really feel relevant to a discussion about why most people don't use it. Most people don't know anything about open source.
It's extremely relevant, as the group of people who are most likely to hear about an alternative browser in the first place are going to be disproportionately favourable and interested in open source specifically.
So by not attracting folks who are interested in open source, the company now has an uphill struggle to market to people who are already bombarded with ads and marketing. And when they do reach someone, if that someone asks a tech-knowledgable friend about it they are more likely to get a response of apathy or negativity towards it because of the closed-source nature.
This is not to say it's impossible to overcome this hurdle, but it makes their job more difficult. And trying to compete with well-established, free products is already pretty hard to do in the first place.
I think it actually was a factor in adoption of Firefox. Enthusiasts switched in part because they understand what open-source means. Ordinary people started using it because their tech-savvy friends insisted it was better than IE, even if they didn’t understand exactly why.
Technically speaking, you can migrate out of Arc pretty quickly just by importing bookmarks into whatever other browser you use and downloading the new extensions. I used it for a bit and went from Chrome to Arc to Firefox in probably around 45 min of migration time.
Everything but the UI is open-source Chromium so the main risk is just telemetry.
I use mainly Vivaldi, and Firefox as a backup browser. I wouldn't mind trying Arc to see what the fuss is about even being closed source. But no deal when they don't even support Linux.
My boss was gushing over Arc and sent me an invite. However, the killer for me was requiring a sign up. Combined with being closed source, this set off alarms and was a hard pass.
Lots of folks jumping on the Arc comments. But what about the author’s actual question? I’ve been sensing it for quite some time - redesigns for the sake of redesign, not to enhance user experience or productivity.
I think he's mostly right. I think it's driven by some of the same panic that pushes so much of the AI boom: companies trying to find the "next big thing" in software. A real possibility is that we are near the end of the era of software innovation. Not that there will be none, but that it will slow down, because so many problems are, well, solved -- at least to the point where most potential customers are satisfied with current solutions.
People will continue to innovate, and some of that will involve software, but it doesn't mean there is a desperate need for software innovation.
There was a point where radio innovations were coming fast and furious. There was a point where mechanical engineering was progressing in leaps and bounds. Fields eventually slow down. It didn't put mechanical engineers out of work. But it's not the kind of field it was in (guessing) 1850.
I also think he's mostly right but even solved problems can still see much improvement. Take for example algorithmic improvements to improve speed or reduce memory requirements. Then there's also massive power usage improvements to be had by re-implementing existing solutions using more efficient languages [1].
It has been a while since a software update was something to look forward to, not something to dread.
I'm sure there must still be problems that can be solved with "more" software or "better" software, but those problems are getting harder and harder to find.
I generally use safari for it’s superior privacy features.
I did use arc, but I found it troublesome for two reasons:
1. I find little arc needs tab switching indicators as I lose windows in it and then close it unknowingly, because it’s not obvious that when it has extra windows open.
2. I’m uncomfortable using a browser where I have to remain signed into it all the time and I’m concerned about the privacy implications of that.
It may be that a commonly established convention is what's meant by a problem being 'solved'. Maybe some things could be done in many different ways that are all about as good as each other. At some point having 'a' way to do things rather than someone's arbitrary notion of the 'best' way is sufficient and trying to find some better way (that may or may not exist) is only a waste of effort.
Arc isn’t unique for it, but vertical tabs would be a boon for most “ordinary” people I know. When I look at others’ browser windows, they usually have so many tabs open, they can only see favicons, and sometimes not even that. Vertical tabs fixes that—but it’s a feature, not a product. If that kind of feature caught on, absolutely nothing would stop Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. from implementing it.
"it's a feature not a product" – this is the perfect summation of Arc for me. I use it at home and enjoy it for a small set of its features, but it's barely a product, and I don't think it's a (viable) company.
What's the business model? Sell subscriptions to their AI stuff? No thanks. Sell me a browser for $40 per version with yearly releases? I'd probably buy that, but that's a 5 person indie software company not a 100+ person VC backed company.
This is probably why they're going back to the drawing board and putting Arc in maintenance mode.
I've been on Brave with vertical tabs since the beginning of the year now. It doesn't seems like most people know about it, but it's more compact and faster than Arc and I couldn't imagine going back to Chrome now.
AFAIK there aren't any good ones for Chrome — you can't disable the tabs on the top of the browser, so you have this giant waste of space. Ditto for Safari. Firefox requires user CSS to disable the tabs on top, and the extensions don't do it for you AFAIK. It's pretty bizarre how the existing browsers have such bad vertical tabs options — only Edge has a decent implementation, and even theirs isn't perfect: if you have enough tabs that they overflow offscreen, there's no visual indication in the UI when you open a new tab, because the new tab appears at the end of the list offscreen and there's no animation or other indication that it was added.
Arc seemed pretty nice from a UI perspective, but crash-y in my experience, with no support for Linux or Android, and their iOS app wasn't even much of a browser. Now it sounds like they're putting Arc into maintenance mode and trying to build a conventional looking browser with AI features, so I think there's not much hope for it.
There’s always closed source, subscription based, privacy invasive software causing problems to be solved. If people didn’t want solutions to these problems I wouldn’t see so many ads for data broker removal services or people complaining about their Adobe subscriptions.
> Is it possible that this explains what happened with Apple’s Photos app?
I’m out of the loop - what happened with Apple’s Photos app? I’ve seen their marketing from announcements earlier in the year and was looking forward to the update - is it underwhelming?
It's more overwhelming than underwhelming. There are many more views now than just "photo grid" and "photo detail" and lots of annoying "smart" albums, which have more special treatments than just a grid of album photos. It feels unresponsive and I often get stuck in a view with no idea how to just get back to the camera roll. I often quit the app in frustration hoping it'll just get me back to my latest photos. Probably the most unnecessary update I've ever seen on iOS.
Right now the competition is Chrome adding features and everyone else taking them away.
Nobody else adds anything except privacy enhancements, so for a typical non privacy focused user the rest are either not that interesting or too small and niche to seem trustworthy.
I don't really want more browsers, what I'd really like to see is Chrome apps and extensions on Mobile, with more power.
With fine grained permissions of course, but still with enough permissions to change the UI, write sandboxed user visible files, and talk to other stuff on the LAN.
It seems like a hard needle to thread: mainstream enough that billions of users will use it with a set of features unique enough that Chrome and Edge won’t just copy.
Tabs was such an obviously good idea all the browsers copied it in short order. Anything arc builds on top of chromium seems destined for the same fate once millions are using it.
If you want to change behavior you have to start with a clear mainstream user need, not building features for power users and hoping they trickle down.
It's hard to square seeing the magnitudes of capability coming from genAI & AR and thinking the web UX is done because someone's idea of browser tab layout is boring
How we use the web today, with the Chrome engine and skins as the user agent, seems like the last decade's local optimum. The community is increasingly iterating to the next leap, and I don't think the winning companies will be perplexity.ai, Anthropic 's compute API, meta's Ray-Bans, or some browser ChatGPT extension startup. There is a lot of room for new winners.
I do agree with ZIRP comments saying this is NOT a matter like Zoom doing everything 10% better to be enough: browser teams need to be thinking 10X+ better on broad use. Brave tapped into the privacy & ads psyche, which is a leap for a large niche, but still not enough compared to some sort of more ambitious Jarvis etc rethink.
No one can know what the winning form factors will be without trying and finding out, so IMO, the next few years are a lot more interesting wrt UX then the last 10+!
Arc and the Browser Company are a great example of the zirp phenomenon. If you look at the offices and the rightly called out hubris of the company which makes a Chrome skin, you would think they are at least Stripe scale.
Our Qwerty keyboards are ubiquitous. You may think there are no problems left with that design, until you are hit with carpel tunnel pains.
Before that, you would not even be aware of the problems and their myriad solutions: better layouts, better hardware designs (like split body or 3d sculpted), or even conceptually unique input devices.
Saying that there’s nothing left to solve signals your position among the conceptually impoverished. It is fine to not know, but it is not wise to proclaim that no one else does or will ever know.
Back to browsers. How could a solution ever arrive? Perhaps someone assumes there is a better way and try to build new things? Should we have instead stopped at letter writing or fax for the solved problem of communication?
I am just glad that there are people who are willing to take on risk to pursue a solution, for problems we are too stupid to care about.
I've had carpel tunnel surgery. It still isn't a problem to solve for most people. They don't type that much, and there are other solutions. The fact that some people have issues with it is not going to lead to a clamor for a different solution.
Arc does some things right. Combining tabs and bookmarks into one cohesive display, that allows the moving of one to the other, makes sense. Having a floating command bar that does more than just "open this URL" as well.
Others have tried to solve the intersection of new discoveries and daily reading workflows, but only Arc seems to present the latter in a way that does not get in the way of the former and does not require N keypresses to get there.
Sidebar plus floating URL bar means much less window chrome, which is (especially for people like me who haven't owned a monitor or a desktop PC for a decade) a welcome freeing experience that maximizes screen estate.
Having a baked in tracker stripper for a one-keypress URL copy is, especially for people like me who copy dozens of URL daily, a boon. No other browser seems to think, that this is something that is needed. And most users seem to have arranged themselves with two keystrokes to highlight the URL bar and copying the contents, followed by dozens of deletes to remove trackers.
Sure, it's small stuff and easily waved off, but if none of the other browsers wants to break with the Netscape early days paradigms, Arc it is[1].
[1] Zen Browser tries, but then, that Mozilla underpinning often sabotages the experience.
> Combining tabs and bookmarks into one cohesive display, that allows the moving of one to the other
While I haven't used arc and don't have experience how that feature feels, I think the over 20 year old concept of a bookmarks menu, and tabs, as separate things is the best and never needed solving, and any attempt be different is worse than the original (like android firefox and its 'collections'. Why? Or Linux file managers hiding bookmarks different locations that operate differently called "Go", "Places" and actual "Bookmarks" that change through versions and sometimes coexist for some reason so you never know which menu it's going to be this time)
I dunno, I don't think the concept of bookmarks works at all well for me. I'd be very keen to try something different.
How does Arc handle the line of death[1]?
[1] https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/ (Though I realise after reading this that this concept isn't really all that relevant anymore)
Almost all of these features sound like things that could be implemented as plugins, or at worst, some minor fork of FF or Chromium.
> Combining tabs and bookmarks into one cohesive display
I've tried to experiment with different ways to present browsing information. One approach is to present the tabs, bookmarks, and history on one open cohesive page, and allows searching all of them at once. Of course the devils are in the details, how to effectively navigate to different sections of the page, how to make sure performance is good, etc. I made a browser extension to try out the idea [1].
[1] One Page Favorites.
Firefox also has a "Copy without URL tracking" option in the URL bar context menu. It's not one-keypress, but clearly a tracker stripper is not Arc-exclusive.
Also no idea what you are talking about with Zen's "Mozilla underpinning sabotaging the experience".
Nowhere on their site (that I can find) do they mention that. There's lots of sales talk about it does all the work and adapts, etc., but nothing about what it actually does.
I can't see a reason to change browsers. What are the features that Arc has that other browsers don't have?
Their sales pitch is the problem they need to solve.
The reason I'm not interested in arc Arc is that its not open source, not even source-available. It may not be hostile to me right now, but the existing browsers that I use definitely aren't (ungoogled-chromium, firefox) and if that changes, well, I have their source code. Figuring out how to switch my workflow to a new browser isn't effortless, either.
Source availability doesn't really feel relevant to a discussion about why most people don't use it. Most people don't know anything about open source.
It's extremely relevant, as the group of people who are most likely to hear about an alternative browser in the first place are going to be disproportionately favourable and interested in open source specifically.
So by not attracting folks who are interested in open source, the company now has an uphill struggle to market to people who are already bombarded with ads and marketing. And when they do reach someone, if that someone asks a tech-knowledgable friend about it they are more likely to get a response of apathy or negativity towards it because of the closed-source nature.
This is not to say it's impossible to overcome this hurdle, but it makes their job more difficult. And trying to compete with well-established, free products is already pretty hard to do in the first place.
I think it actually was a factor in adoption of Firefox. Enthusiasts switched in part because they understand what open-source means. Ordinary people started using it because their tech-savvy friends insisted it was better than IE, even if they didn’t understand exactly why.
Technically speaking, you can migrate out of Arc pretty quickly just by importing bookmarks into whatever other browser you use and downloading the new extensions. I used it for a bit and went from Chrome to Arc to Firefox in probably around 45 min of migration time.
Everything but the UI is open-source Chromium so the main risk is just telemetry.
Shit is not even available in Linux.
I use mainly Vivaldi, and Firefox as a backup browser. I wouldn't mind trying Arc to see what the fuss is about even being closed source. But no deal when they don't even support Linux.
My boss was gushing over Arc and sent me an invite. However, the killer for me was requiring a sign up. Combined with being closed source, this set off alarms and was a hard pass.
Lots of folks jumping on the Arc comments. But what about the author’s actual question? I’ve been sensing it for quite some time - redesigns for the sake of redesign, not to enhance user experience or productivity.
I think he's mostly right. I think it's driven by some of the same panic that pushes so much of the AI boom: companies trying to find the "next big thing" in software. A real possibility is that we are near the end of the era of software innovation. Not that there will be none, but that it will slow down, because so many problems are, well, solved -- at least to the point where most potential customers are satisfied with current solutions.
People will continue to innovate, and some of that will involve software, but it doesn't mean there is a desperate need for software innovation.
There was a point where radio innovations were coming fast and furious. There was a point where mechanical engineering was progressing in leaps and bounds. Fields eventually slow down. It didn't put mechanical engineers out of work. But it's not the kind of field it was in (guessing) 1850.
I also think he's mostly right but even solved problems can still see much improvement. Take for example algorithmic improvements to improve speed or reduce memory requirements. Then there's also massive power usage improvements to be had by re-implementing existing solutions using more efficient languages [1].
1. https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sle...
It has been a while since a software update was something to look forward to, not something to dread.
I'm sure there must still be problems that can be solved with "more" software or "better" software, but those problems are getting harder and harder to find.
I generally use safari for it’s superior privacy features.
I did use arc, but I found it troublesome for two reasons:
1. I find little arc needs tab switching indicators as I lose windows in it and then close it unknowingly, because it’s not obvious that when it has extra windows open.
2. I’m uncomfortable using a browser where I have to remain signed into it all the time and I’m concerned about the privacy implications of that.
From a market penetration perspective, FireFox is not winning, but as a worker in the Cyber Security space, almost all my peers use FireFox.
It may be that a commonly established convention is what's meant by a problem being 'solved'. Maybe some things could be done in many different ways that are all about as good as each other. At some point having 'a' way to do things rather than someone's arbitrary notion of the 'best' way is sufficient and trying to find some better way (that may or may not exist) is only a waste of effort.
Arc isn’t unique for it, but vertical tabs would be a boon for most “ordinary” people I know. When I look at others’ browser windows, they usually have so many tabs open, they can only see favicons, and sometimes not even that. Vertical tabs fixes that—but it’s a feature, not a product. If that kind of feature caught on, absolutely nothing would stop Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. from implementing it.
"it's a feature not a product" – this is the perfect summation of Arc for me. I use it at home and enjoy it for a small set of its features, but it's barely a product, and I don't think it's a (viable) company.
What's the business model? Sell subscriptions to their AI stuff? No thanks. Sell me a browser for $40 per version with yearly releases? I'd probably buy that, but that's a 5 person indie software company not a 100+ person VC backed company.
This is probably why they're going back to the drawing board and putting Arc in maintenance mode.
I've been on Brave with vertical tabs since the beginning of the year now. It doesn't seems like most people know about it, but it's more compact and faster than Arc and I couldn't imagine going back to Chrome now.
Chrome has groups. You can expand collapse them. It somewhat helps.
A decent fzf style history search runnable from the top bar might encourage me to close more tabs.
There is no shortage of extensions for existing browsers that give you vertical tabs down the left side.
AFAIK there aren't any good ones for Chrome — you can't disable the tabs on the top of the browser, so you have this giant waste of space. Ditto for Safari. Firefox requires user CSS to disable the tabs on top, and the extensions don't do it for you AFAIK. It's pretty bizarre how the existing browsers have such bad vertical tabs options — only Edge has a decent implementation, and even theirs isn't perfect: if you have enough tabs that they overflow offscreen, there's no visual indication in the UI when you open a new tab, because the new tab appears at the end of the list offscreen and there's no animation or other indication that it was added.
Arc seemed pretty nice from a UI perspective, but crash-y in my experience, with no support for Linux or Android, and their iOS app wasn't even much of a browser. Now it sounds like they're putting Arc into maintenance mode and trying to build a conventional looking browser with AI features, so I think there's not much hope for it.
Kinda sad that browser UIs are frozen in 2008.
There’s always closed source, subscription based, privacy invasive software causing problems to be solved. If people didn’t want solutions to these problems I wouldn’t see so many ads for data broker removal services or people complaining about their Adobe subscriptions.
> Is it possible that this explains what happened with Apple’s Photos app?
I’m out of the loop - what happened with Apple’s Photos app? I’ve seen their marketing from announcements earlier in the year and was looking forward to the update - is it underwhelming?
It's more overwhelming than underwhelming. There are many more views now than just "photo grid" and "photo detail" and lots of annoying "smart" albums, which have more special treatments than just a grid of album photos. It feels unresponsive and I often get stuck in a view with no idea how to just get back to the camera roll. I often quit the app in frustration hoping it'll just get me back to my latest photos. Probably the most unnecessary update I've ever seen on iOS.
Right now the competition is Chrome adding features and everyone else taking them away.
Nobody else adds anything except privacy enhancements, so for a typical non privacy focused user the rest are either not that interesting or too small and niche to seem trustworthy.
I don't really want more browsers, what I'd really like to see is Chrome apps and extensions on Mobile, with more power.
With fine grained permissions of course, but still with enough permissions to change the UI, write sandboxed user visible files, and talk to other stuff on the LAN.
It seems like a hard needle to thread: mainstream enough that billions of users will use it with a set of features unique enough that Chrome and Edge won’t just copy.
Tabs was such an obviously good idea all the browsers copied it in short order. Anything arc builds on top of chromium seems destined for the same fate once millions are using it.
If you want to change behavior you have to start with a clear mainstream user need, not building features for power users and hoping they trickle down.
It's hard to square seeing the magnitudes of capability coming from genAI & AR and thinking the web UX is done because someone's idea of browser tab layout is boring
How we use the web today, with the Chrome engine and skins as the user agent, seems like the last decade's local optimum. The community is increasingly iterating to the next leap, and I don't think the winning companies will be perplexity.ai, Anthropic 's compute API, meta's Ray-Bans, or some browser ChatGPT extension startup. There is a lot of room for new winners.
I do agree with ZIRP comments saying this is NOT a matter like Zoom doing everything 10% better to be enough: browser teams need to be thinking 10X+ better on broad use. Brave tapped into the privacy & ads psyche, which is a leap for a large niche, but still not enough compared to some sort of more ambitious Jarvis etc rethink.
No one can know what the winning form factors will be without trying and finding out, so IMO, the next few years are a lot more interesting wrt UX then the last 10+!
The remarks about calculators made me remember the Google's horrible calculator app in Android.
Why is there no Arc for Linux
Vertical tabs dont work because the width of a screen is bigger than height.
I'm genuinely curious why you think utilization of the more abundant resource is a bad idea.
Personally I've always wondered why the taskbar and toolbars didn't switch to the side once resolutions got to and especially beyond 1080p
Vertical tabs work so well because the width of a screen is bigger than height.
I saw an ad for Opera on YouTube that argued why Opera is better because it lets you organize tabs in groups.
Somehow tab management is the killer feature that will change browsers?
Vertical tabs are working for LibreOffice's menus, which have lots of tabs, and are now getting converted.
Arc and the Browser Company are a great example of the zirp phenomenon. If you look at the offices and the rightly called out hubris of the company which makes a Chrome skin, you would think they are at least Stripe scale.
They do always seem to be on a company retreat abroad in all their marketing content. That ain't cheap.
For those of us confused that’s Arc the browser, not Arc the framework powering HN: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(web_browser)
The fonts and colors on that website are really nice. Just thought I'd add that.
Now it will become a question of keeping the things we are used to having, for instance adblock (chrome) and privacy (recall).
What?
If you're gunna post a blog, at least choose one that writes well.
What makes you consider this a bad blog post? I liked it
Nothing left to solve, or too stupid to care?
Our Qwerty keyboards are ubiquitous. You may think there are no problems left with that design, until you are hit with carpel tunnel pains.
Before that, you would not even be aware of the problems and their myriad solutions: better layouts, better hardware designs (like split body or 3d sculpted), or even conceptually unique input devices.
Saying that there’s nothing left to solve signals your position among the conceptually impoverished. It is fine to not know, but it is not wise to proclaim that no one else does or will ever know.
Back to browsers. How could a solution ever arrive? Perhaps someone assumes there is a better way and try to build new things? Should we have instead stopped at letter writing or fax for the solved problem of communication?
I am just glad that there are people who are willing to take on risk to pursue a solution, for problems we are too stupid to care about.
I've had carpel tunnel surgery. It still isn't a problem to solve for most people. They don't type that much, and there are other solutions. The fact that some people have issues with it is not going to lead to a clamor for a different solution.
Calling people stupid is not a useful response.