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The browsercompany is shaking up the stagnant browser market. If you haven’t tried the arc browser yet, take a look. It’s available for mac and on the waiting list for windows: https://arc.net/. Here are some opinions on this “new” browser from a person who has taken the path: chrome (windows)-> safari(mac)-> firefox(mac)-> arc(mac) route.

Table of Contents

  1. Things I like
  2. Things I don’t like
  3. Conclusion

Things I like

  1. My favourite feature (which led me to switch from Firefox) was the ability to create spaces with different profiles. In other words, I have a space with the websites I visit at work with my work (email) profile and I have another space, separate from the first, with my personal websites/profiles. And to switch between them I just swipe on the sidebar.
  2. Within each space, the tabs can belong to pinned tabs, be favourites (like bookmarks) or be today tabs. Both pinned and favourite tabs are always in the sidebar (open or closed), while favourite tabs can be collapsed (recent feature). In addition, in favourites you can create folders of sites, and even share these folders. On the other hand, today tabs are, as the name suggests, tabs that you open but after a while are automatically closed. In this sense, arc allows you to have a threshold whereby after x amount of time (12h, 24h,…) these today tabs are closed and disappear from view.
  3. Recently, arc has also added features in which it uses AI to improve certain tasks. My favourites are the automatic renaming of tabs that we put in favourites, and the renaming of downloads files.
  4. You can share quotes from websites, i.e. a link that goes to the area of the website where the quote you want is highlighted.
  5. They are very transparent about the updates they make, sometimes even making videos explaining the new features. Think about it, how many browsers make an effort to tell you what the new update will do?
  6. You can create a kind of mini browser window if you want to do a smaller search without opening a new tab.


Things I don’t like

However, there are also things I don’t like so much:

  1. It’s based on chromium, which on the one hand is good because for example all the extensions that exist in chrome, exist in arc, but also many of the problems that chrome has are inherited. For example, I notice that it’s not as fast as firefox and that in some tasks, firefox is more efficient (I have it as a backup). However, it has to be said that it is significantly faster than safari. Just the other day I opened it and couldn’t believe the difference.
  2. The AI features I didn’t mention above, although good, are still a bit slow for my standard, so I don’t use them. Besides, I don’t think they’ll be free forever.
  3. The monetisation of this browser, or lack of it, worries me a lot. Although the path they want to take is, in a way, correct and better for the user, I don’t know how sustainable it will be in the long term.


Conclusion

All in all, I believe arc is a great alternative for the current status quo of browsers and I salute the company for even trying to get into this saturated market. Plus, it could become a gret productivity tool if you know some keyboard shortcuts.
So, if you’re looking to try something new give this new browser a try, you won’t regret it.