Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web | Hacker News Reader

Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web

tidbits.com

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> We’ve raised over $17 million dollars from a diverse group that includes the founders of Instagram, Stripe, Twitter, Zoom, Figma, and LinkedIn.

https://thebrowser.company/#15

> We may also de-identify or anonymize Personal Data to further our legitimate interests.

https://start.arc.net/privacy-rights-by-region

Closed source, as far as I could tell.

It looks like a really nice product but the combination of these little factoids and their divergence from claims made on the browser's primary marketing website does leave me feeling a little bit uneasy.

I share this sentiment. It feels a bit like a product pitch that is intended to be acquired away.

If i could get even 1$ for reskinning chrome i would be so happy.

NOTHING mentioned on this page can't be done natively or with extensions in other browsers. What is so revolutionary about it?

And I won't even mention the landing page for the browser itself which is just 2 page scrolls of "Arc is a browser and more..." with signup links for the wainting list, no description of what it is, what it does, nothing.

There is more text here: https://thebrowser.company

Yup. I wonder if people who "always carefully arrange my apps on my extended desktop" and have time to write articles such "The 46 Mac Apps I Actually Use and Why" actually do some work or just spend their time tidying and making lists.

sometimes good defaults are life changing

it's similar to asm vs python vs lisp

It's called paid advertisement, and that's how these blogs make money.

The article's main claim is that Arc is the most transformative software in decades, plural, which takes us to a time before Google Maps existed, before all smartphone apps existed, and before online banking was ubiquitous. It's safe to say this article was written from somewhere on the hype curve.

You mean like Workona? This browser sounds a lot like their extension https://workona.com

I'm currently building the open source version of Arc'Easel feature as a solo desktop app.

Feel free to sign up if you are interested to try: https://memento.allen0s.com/

(Launch in 30 days)

I hate this trend of landing pages that don’t show anything because they’re ~ so mysterious ~

Anyway, as someone who doesn’t use Arc (yet) but had the chance to assist a quickie (15 minutes presentation in a conference) and had a coworker show it to me, I have to say I’m excited to give it a try when I get the chance. It really seems to solve cleanly some pain points I’ve had for years:

- vertical / horizontal split of tabs is supported

- auto closing of tabs seems like a great feature

- easels look extremely useful, even for dashboarding (they even allow to embed page sections with auto reload)

- links from other apps open in « little arc » so they don’t pollute the tab list (unless you actively want to keep the tab)

I’m glad to see innovation in this space.

if you want to try it, here is an invite code: https://arc.net/gift/18d8d85b

I personally didn't like that everything is in the side bar, especially because it makes it difficult to see an entire URL. I also missed the ability to group tabs like in Microsoft Edge, but the "Spaces" would probably be able to replace that.

Thanks!

Arc is still just a fancy Chrome front-end.

I refuse to use Chrome-based browsers just to keep things non-monocultural on the web. Even though I do know it's a losing battle.

> I refuse to use Chrome-based browsers just to keep things non-monocultural on the web. Even though I do know it's a losing battle.

It was a losing battle to make anything other than Internet Explorer a first-class citizen on the web—until the alternatives became so much better that users and developers switched because they wanted to, not because they should. (Which is to say, keep up the fight—today's it a Google monopoly, but people do look at their usage stats, and a minuscule percentage using a non-Chrome browser is still better than 0.)

I remember the bad old days of IE dominance. For this reason I’m on Firefox at work and home. I don’t want to go back.

Too bad Chromium is open source instead of Free Software. Seems like it's spawning a number of incompatible and sometimes user-hostile forks.

I'm really on the fence because I don't want a Google owned web, but at the same time, IMHO Chromium is the superior browser engine out there. I'd like to see it be pulled out of their control (donated by them willingly) and put into maybe like a browser foundation where all major browsers that are built on top of it vote and get a say in how it goes, just like most foundations.

I'd rather we have a single unified web experience than hacking around various browser engines to display on our sites.

Browsers should just be skins over this unified experience to add their own quirks they want, be it Google login shit or Microsoft's shit or even Brave's crypto shit.

even if chromium was freed from google, that would not be good enough. code-monoculture is dangerous. we really need multiple implementations of widely used applications to reduce the risk of exploits that would affect everyone. that goes for browsers, smtp or dns servers and anything else that is publicly accessible. (browsers are "accessible" through the websites we visit)

i am with the top poster of this subthread. i absolutely refuse to use anything chrome based to avoid furthering a monoculture.

> Browsers should just be skins over this unified experience to add their own quirks they want

Oh, no. Please no.

Do you mean Chromium based or is it literally Chrome behind it?

I've been using Arc on my personal machine for a couple months now, and my favorite feature is one that surprised me:

Tab persistence is opt-in

Meaning that, unless you explicitly pin a tab, or stick it in a folder you create, it will get automatically closed after some period of time (in practice for me this meant between browsing sessions).

Initially this surprised and annoyed me, but over time it prodded me to be intentional about evaluating whether my tabs are disposable, or need to be held on to across multiple sessions, which I've found led to much tidier browsing habits.

Other features of Arc (spaces, pop-up previews, folders, tab renaming) aren't particularly novel, but the way they integrate seamlessly and function intuitively with inputs I'm used to, has made the whole thing a really pleasant experience in a way I've never been able to achieve by cobbling together extensions in other browser.

Really hope their ideas catch on and they start to see some competition because Arc is doing a great job bringing novelty while maintaining polish and I'd love to see some of this UX replicated in a non-chromium browser.

It's been interesting seeing tab persistence slowly become the default in recent years. I've never quite understood it. Maybe it's just my way of coping with some sort of mild undiagnosed ADD, but if I open my browser for one thing and something else pops up I tend to forget what the first thing was so I've always set my browser up to open a single tab to about:blank (or at least some sort of blank page. It's gotten more complicated recently). It's always interesting to see how other people's brains work, but also validating to hear I'm not the only one with a need for "tidier browsing habits".

there’s also different mindsets when browsing. I want my “junk drawer” of tabs to be automatically tidied but my more curated long term tabs in named tab groups to be persistent

But I never seem to use tab groups as much as I am theoretically excited to :/

I use a FF extension to do something similar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/

I usually do Reddit/HN binges where Ill open up 30+ tabs that are of interest and make my way through the list but if I don't get to them in under 10 minutes, the tabs automatically close and I'll forget them while still getting the dopamine hit of clicking on all the novel headlines :)

# Kagi Orion

I encourage HN readers on MacOS to consider Kagi's excellent Orion browser:

https://browser.kagi.com/

It has sidebar tab contexts (as hierarchical tab sessions), and several other of the features this author is excited about.

# Safari Ventura / iOS 16

For that matter, so does Safari on Ventura and iOS 16.

I also encourage new-to-Mac users to try using Safari's sidebar mode coupled with saved and sync'd tab groups, where an unnamed / unsaved set of tabs are in the anonymous group at the top, then use the saved groups the way the author describes. By sticking with Safari, you gain benefits of the private/anonymized browsing features (iCloud "Private Relay") not available in Arc or most others besides Tor. I consider this strictly superior to VPNs if you are trying to swim less in the advertising dragnet.

For me Safari works best with my workflow across devices when I both use the sidebar and change Safari preferences to reopen with all tabs from prior session (or all tabs except private).

For "profiles" I mostly use Safari in private mode with a password manager to make logging in as whichever account frictionless. This makes profiled sessions discrete and disposable.

Safari is my primary browser, but I do love some of the UI/UX things Arc is doing. But it's not enough to pry me from Safari, largely due to just how engrained in the iOS ecosystem I am (Apple Pay, Passkeys, Login with Apple, etc.)

My hope for Safari in iOS 17 / macOS 14 is allowing tab groups to be sandboxed (similar to profiles in Arc, or containers in Firefox).

Safari doesn’t offer a full implementation of vertical tabs. It’s still not possible to hide the horizontal tab bar. I’ve also found Safari’s vertical tabs to lag behind the state of the horizontal tabs.

I like Orion and Arc. Both browsers have good vertical tabs implementations. I like some their other features, but I would prefer to use Safari full time.

I've tried Arc and have since reverted back to Firefox. It has a bunch of features I like, but one huge drawback that kind of kills it for me. Arc gives you persistent tabs across all open windows, and you wind up with (whether you want to or not) numerous open windows. That means I have to sift through 5+ open windows of identical tabs just to find the one window with the tab containing the Reddit comment I was in the middle of writing.

It ends up being more hassle than it's worth. Most of us use multiple windows to divide up separate, short-term pieces of work that we don't really need to persist very long, and Arc just doesn't deal with this scenario well at all. I think the only solution would be to somehow sync the state of all tabs across all windows (so my half-written Reddit comment appears in the same Reddit tab in every window).

It deals with that through having multiple "spaces" - horizontal scroll on the tabs to get to another one that can have completely different tabs for a different context.

But they haven't smoothed out the UX with multiple windows, which has all the annoyances that you point out. I think they need to figure out how to nudge users towards going to a different space instead of a new window, or automatically launch each new window with a new space.

I think it's more than just shifting users from thinking in windows to thinking in spaces - the problem is fundamentally that spaces don't fill the use-case of a separate window. A space is a permanent place for a collection of tabs, I think they even enable separate logins. To "destroy" a space requires the user going through a series of actions (right click > delete space > confirm deletion).

I use windows as a temporary collection of related things. If I'm researching a purchasing decision, for instance, I'll have a tab with the Amazon listing and a bunch of tabs containing information/reviews about the item. But I only need that for a couple hours, then I want to easily dump everything by closing that window. And I want to be able to easily find just my research info by scanning my open windows. Spaces are too permanent for that use case.

Another way to say that is that Spaces need their own windows sometimes, too, and Arc deals with that scenario way worse than a traditional browser. They need some "in-between" solution if they don't want users needing multiple windows, or they need to handle multiple windows better.

“Most of us use multiple windows to divide up separate, short-term pieces of work that we don't really need to persist very long,”

Thats when you open up a little arc.

>> Most of us use multiple windows to divide up separate, short-term pieces of work that we don't really need to persist very long

I think that’s a big assumption.

I’ve been using Arc for the past 4 months or so and it’s so good that when logging into my old comp and realizing I was going to use Safari or Chrome I immediately went and downloaded it.

The sidebar took me about a week to get used to. The tan manager and “launcher” cmd+t UX is a delight.

I actually look forward to Thursday’s new releases to see what features they’ve shipped. I can’t wait for a good version of their iOS browser (the current is just too bare feature-wise for me right now).

I think I would end up paying a modest monthly fee to use arc on all my machines. It’s such a refreshing take on using the web.

I think I have 3 invites left if anyone wants one. Just let me know

Take me through how this compares to 'Trusting Google' in Chrome - as in, owning multiple google accounts and using their profiles built into Chrome.

I realize I may be unique in that all my contexts come with unique Google Workspace accounts - separate domains as well.

So perhaps my setup is what they attempt to replicate for folks with fewer accounts?

[Edit] would love an invite :D [Edit x2] I love this community, I got one, thank you!

I had dismissed this as yet another tab management browser widget thingy, but I took a closer look at it.

To me, what is really standout, is what they have done with "spaces." They are basically profiles, which is something no browser currently does well.

Ultimately it comes down to being a cookie manager to an extent. I love the idea that I can have different accounts for various projects, and when I switch between the different projects (spaces), the accounts are automatically logged in. Because it apparently keeps tabs (har har) on not only what tabs you have open, but also what session cookies are being used in them.

This is based entirely on watching some videos, I haven't tried it out yet. But this may actually be a really useful and innovative browser.

Sidebery for Firefox is integrated with profiles pretty well.

In general, the article seems to be an overly excited marketing pitch for yet another closed source Chromium-based browser, the main feature of which seems to be a... vertical tab bar? Which seems to be mimicking Sidebery to a close degree? Underwhelming.

As someone that has actually used the browser for the past few months, it’s really about the flow and UX. Arc fits in the MacOS environment and has many small flourishes that just feel good.

There has been a steady stream of new features, my favorite one being Peek which opens up a temporary page on top of the one your current tab.

I had not heard of Sidebery, I'll have to check it out. Thanks!

> Sidebery for Firefox is integrated with profiles pretty well.

Sorry, but no. This is from someone whose main browser is Firefox with Sidebery.

Sidebery can be configured to have a relatively low integration with containers - not profiles. You could argue that containers are very similar to profiles, and in a sense they are - but there's no deeply integrated UI/UX between Sidebery and containers.

The spacial isolation Arc does by tying a space to a profile is much stronger and IMO much easier to grok than anything with Firefox and containers.

A really interesting factoid about Arc that I'm not sure many know about: their upcoming Windows app is written in Swift and SwiftUI. They've contributed significantly to the language to get it building on Windows and are re-implementing Win native backends for some of Apple's core libraries. All of this will be open source when they're done (or so they claim).

Source for this? SwiftUI depends heavily on Apple/macOS-only APIs, both in use and design.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/comments/135rznb/arc_on_...

this tweet[1] from one of their engineers claims that the Windows version is completely written in SwiftUI using WinUI[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/steven_brix/status/1588552544963690497 [2] https://microsoft.github.io/microsoft-ui-xaml/

Arc is pretty unique in that is does away with bookmarks and instead sorts your tabs into three "tiers"

- Favorites, pretty much like pinned tabs in every other browser, but these feel more durable, accidentally navigating away is not a thing and Arc doesn't really open multiple windows.

- Pinned, which are bookmarks and tabs at the same time.

- Today, which are ephemeral tabs that are automatically purged after 12 hours, but easy to bring back.

It almost feels like they managed to make a hybrid of a browser and something like Rambox, and I do like it for that. It is great for muscle memory (favorite/pinned tabs always in the same place) and easy context switching. I wouldn't call it revolutionary, but it certainly is a lot more polished than other niche browsers. For now they also don't add too many "why is this here" features, which are hard to avoid in any browser these days.

It's great for a particular type of person: Someone who uses a lot of web apps but never cleans out any of their tabs, except all at once to start from scratch.

Hey, nice, that's something I've waited for for a while!

I hope they'll eventually publish the code (when the company dies or something), so that I can use it.

Safari has:

(0) Favorites, which can have icons turned off and be text menus with nesting across your browser bar horizontally,

(1) Tab Groups, which persist and live in the side bar vertically with lists under each, and

(2) ephemeral tabs (transient, today, etc.) that live above the tab groups, and can disappear when you quit/rerun browser or be restored (I use that mode). And, just for fun, it also has

(3) "Pinned Tabs" that stay pinned at the left of your tab row. Both (1) Tab Groups and (2) ephemeral tabs have their own unique (3) Pinned tabs.

Certainly favorites are bookmarks while tab groups are tabs, but there's little difference in practical use as you can right click a favorites hierarchy and "open in tab group".

The ephemeral class are unique per Apple device, while the Tab Groups are shared across devices. Both are synced across devices, you can browse to the ephemeral class on other Apple devices using the "iCloud Tabs" button at bottom of sidebar.

Pretty nice.

Good thing I have Firefox. Using Tree Style Tabs and a few accompanying extensions, I can group my tabs the way I like, fold / expand groups and subgroups, rearrange, etc.

Using the Auto Tab Discard extension, I can keep rarely-used tabs offloaded from RAM, so having 200 tabs is not a burden any more.

I can also open several Firefox windows, and move tabs around to form topic groups, for instance. I can drag whole tab subtrees between them, or send them via a context menu. Another extension allows me to name windows, and my window manager is good at tiling or snapping windows together.

It's great that Arc offers a guided and pampered experience like that. It's also great that I can have it using open source products for free.

I’m interested to know what extensions you are using?

I've been using Arc for months, it's a total game changer for the way I work. As a non-technical user, I don't care that the tech is just a re-skin of chrome. It solved 1-2 annoying things with spaces + persistent tabs therefore I adopted it. If those things exist in chrome it wasn't easy enough for me to figure out. Users like me don't care about the underlying tech, they just care that it does something better for them.

Arc user for a few months now (after a failed first attempt to switch late last year). The article is a pretty solid rundown of what makes it different. You do need to approach it with a willingness to change how you interact with your browser, specifically how you organize and use bookmarks and tabs.

If you try to fight against the way they suggest you use Arc, then you might as well stick with what you are using. If you are willing to try some of the new ideas for a few weeks, you might find that they make a lot of sense for you and Arc will quickly become very familiar and switching back to Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Safari will be frustrating. Or maybe the way you work with the browser is not compatible with how Arc works and you'll abandon it after a few weeks and wonder what all the fuss is about.

Five invites if you want to give it a go: https://arc.net/gift/cc465c9e

OSX only right now, eh?

Anyone on Linux replicated what is special about Arc?

At first glance, I'm assuming this requires shifting my usage patterns, which sounds painful, though the rave reviews so far do indicate it is worth it. But, I wish there was a more granular breakdown of the problem statement and how they solve it. Auto-closing tabs sounds very scary and very interesting.

> OSX only right now, eh?

Right now yes, but also this [0]. Also, the OS hasn't been called "OS X" since 2016.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/comments/135rznb/arc_on_...

That made me laugh. macOS is what I should be using?

The sidebar just looks like TreeStyleTabs from Firefox. I wish Firefox would have these as "blessed" or native UI.

I really like Arc for a few of the reasons mentioned in the article:

- It does the best job at managing multiple profiles that I've seen. You can have a single profile apply to multiple "spaces" or just one profile per space, whatever you want. Makes it really easy to swap back and forth between personal and work.

- The "Peek" functionality when previewing links to tweets or viewing media from Discord is really nicely done and saves your tab list from becoming polluted with temporary browsing

- The pinned tabs functionality has a great little feature that easily lets you reset back to the original page you pinned the tab for. I have a HN pinned tab that I use to browse to comments sections like this one, but if I hover over the favicon, it shows that clicking it will take me "back to pinned tab" or in my case, the HN front page. Really nice hidden functionality.

I don't tend to use tabs much. Is there anything compelling in Arc for users like me?

I signed up and used Arc for a little bit and I was pretty unimpressed. The “spaces” style workflow was an interesting idea but as the number of tabs grew, I found myself fretting over organizing them, and at that point it became more of an impediment to my workflow than anything. I quickly went back to just having a giant mess of tabs which I clear out regularly by closing and re-opening (once or twice per day).

The color and theme system is pretty cool, but hard to use. I sent some feedback to the Arc team about it and got an automated response with no follow-up.

The mobile version, at least on iOS, is atrocious.

A lot of their new features like screenshots, editing web pages, etc look very neat, but in my weeks of use I haven’t found a single practical application.

Overall I’d like to see more competition in the browser space which is why I agreed to sign up and test it out, but Arc isn’t really innovating.

I use Tablerone, which is really good but takes some concentration to use effectively. It also is among the worst things to find help about, bc there is very little and most of it relates to chocolate.

https://tabler.one/

This looks a lot like a combination of several Firefox addons made to work well together. Sideberry combined with the ideas behind Panorama (which nobody else seems to remember) offer a lot of these features it seems.

Looks Apple-only though, so I guess I'll never know the difference.

Been using it for months for work and play and haven't looked back. It prevents accumulating tabs infinitely, and has a number of quality of life improvements that I now can't live without

I concur. Strangely enough for me to say — Arc changed the way I look at browsers. The UX is so much different and enjoyable. Not sure I want to get back to another browser after that. Now that I think of it — I might even be ready to pay for it. Yep, the change is that significant to me.

Finally, some sort of description of what this Arc thing is actually like. It's a shame that The Browser Company tells you literally nothing about their product on their own website. It's a pretty baffling marketing tactic.

I really like Brave, is there any reason to actively switch over to something like Arc?

I think it has to match some kind of tabbing workflow some people use. I tried it and didn't like it at all. But I don't feel like I have a tab problem, I use virtual screens to separate research subject.

I use brave too. It feels snappier than anything else, and I regularly test other browser options for a minute/hour/day depending on how well they do, and I've kept coming back to brave. Built in very fast and good adblocking seems to win out.

Personally I use Chrome’s first party profiles + tab groups to manage persistent tabs. Got more than a hundred persistent tabs and a couple hundred more ephemeral ones across three profiles and haven’t been overwhelmed yet.

I wanted to enjoy arc but it's very slow and does some small weird things that I really don't like. It's going to take a lot of work to get me off of Firefox for my daily.

Sadly I've been on the waitlist ever since this was mentioned.

I can send you an invite!

edit: sent.

Thank you <3

edit: thank you for the invite!

Sent you one :)

5 invites here https://arc.net/gift/9534a0b0

Another 5 invites are here https://arc.net/gift/b147d620

https://arc.net/gift/379c8ab

You want mine?

Invite https://arc.net/gift/3536eabe

thanks friend!

People waiting on the arc waitlist should also give Opera + Tab Suspender a try. I heavily use the native Opera sidebar which is what I believe has people here interested in Arc.

I prefer the Arc that hacker news is written in...

Did anything ever become of Bel?

It is a nice app to use, but my life depends on bookmarks and I’m happy with them. So I used Arc for an hour and gave up. Spotify and Slack integration nice though.

Here’s 5 more invites:

https://arc.net/gift/m/c04e59ea

What's the point of putting a browser behind a waitlist? I was ready to give it a try!

I think Arc is an interesting browser, but not groundbreaking enough.

Where's the source code?

They don't explicitly say it, but if you browse the parent company site[1] the overall impression you get is "closed source / commercial". Based on job postings their browser is chromium based[2].

[1] https://thebrowser.company/

[2] https://jobs.lever.co/thebrowser-company/dffb486a-c581-43ca-...

Interesting find. They explicitly call out Chromium, and enhancing it (rather than their own proprietary forked SDK?) so hopefully they contribute back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com