The Arc Browser

The browser wars, as we knew them back in the 90s through the 2010s, are largely over: IE won over Netscape, Firefox sprung up to provide a much-needed alternative, then Google came and ate everyone’s lunch on the desktop while splitting the difference with Safari on mobile. Every browser—save Firefox—runs on top of Webkit & Chromium, which guarantees at least a common rendering engine and a stable base of features for web development.

Most see the ongoing dominance of Chromium as a danger to the open web in the lack of diversity; Firefox remains the primary holdout with their Gecko engine. While that concern is valid for the long term, the impact of collapsing rendering engines into a commodity, in the medium term, is that it reroutes innovation elsewhere in the browser stack. Specifically, instead of spending resources on building and supporting custom renderers1, companies have instead built new browsers differentiating on end-user features.

We’ve seen the major browser developers consolidate in the past decade: Opera switched rendering engines back in 2013, while Microsoft relaunched their Edge browser on top of Chromium in 2020. The more interesting development, though, has been with small startup teams, now competing on functionality instead of rendering prowess. There are a number of them now: bigger ones like Brave and Vivaldi, and then the more niche competitors like Sidekick, SigmaOS, and Arc.

Courtesy of a colleague, I received an invite to the ongoing Arc beta, which I’ve been running on my primary machine for the past few months. Maybe it’s the decade I’ve been running Chrome as my main browser, but I’m finding a lot to like about Arc, and I’m finding myself slowly but steadily migrating my browsing habits over. It adheres to my mental model of what a desktop web browser should do in the year 2023:

  1. A persistent container for webapps;
  2. A repository for online documents, which exist in the form of webpages;
  3. A research tool2.

In addition to the sublime aesthetics and attention to detail3, there are a number of features implemented at the browser level—that I haven’t been able to replicate with Chrome or Safari extensions—that speak to the above workflows.

  • The biggest feature would probably be Spaces. They’re similar to tab groups, but better defined and organized. More importantly, each Space can have its own profile, with its own session, extensions, history, etc., separating user accounts without going through tedious logins or running multiple browsers at the same time.
  • My favorite feature, though, is their mini-browser, Little Arc. It’s a quick browser window that pops up from any link in any other app, and can also be invoked with a keyboard shortcut. Little Arc plays nicely with macOS virtual spaces, only showing up for a quick lookup in the same space and then getting out of the way without jumping around.
  • Having Little Arc readily available, along with persistent browser windows that don’t close with the last tab, means that I can organize my macOS spaces with Arc’s spaces and have each virtual desktop contain all the native + webapps needed for that workflow. This is the logical extension of Pinned Tabs, and gets closer to the idea of webapps-as-native-apps without using browser wrapper apps.
  • It has the affordances of a text editor/IDE: split views, a ⌘+T command bar that’s cleverly overloaded when invoking a new tab, plenty of keyboard shortcuts, and accessible user customization. It’s one of the rare instances where it feels like an app built by engineers for engineers, but with a flair for design on top.

Of course, Arc isn’t perfect either. It’s only available as an invite-only app on MacOS, lacking any mobile presence or even a Windows app to sync tabs across. It requires an account to use—which I suppose is standard for a service nowadays, but is somewhat strange for browser, especially since it’s using iCloud for syncing data. The marketing pages for the company and the browser are cute, but they don’t even bother explaining their product. That last part is particularly concerning; with no obvious way to generate revenues, I have no idea if I can trust the app to stick around for the long-term.

For the time being, though, Arc is a new web browser that tries a bunch of new ideas as well as brings some polish and style to an industry that—for as long as the internet has been around—has gone through multiple competition and consolidation cycles. For now, I’m glad I can ditch desktop Chrome & Safari, and use something that’s seeing exciting and active development.


  1. And really, it was mainly Microsoft and Opera trying to make it work before both companies conceded that it wasn’t worth the effort.

  2. Various devices and services have integrated search results inline over the years: Google Assistant, Spotlight, URL inputs. They all fall back to a browser window, though, when their summaries don’t capture all the information.

  3. It introduces the fanciest color picker I’ve ever used in an app as a part of the onboarding setup.

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