Act II of Arc Browser [video]

1. Releasing a web browser that grabs website data instead of sending the user the site feels counter-productive to me. 2. Scraping data seems to be a short-term mindset that will kill the sources of good material on which the AI is dependent. 3. Criticizing Google while building a Chromium browser feels a little goofy to me.

The minimal UI and split view were fun features of the early Arc Browser versions, but this increasing dependency on AI is making me uncomfortable.

Oh man, Arc user here and genuinely like the product, but they really need to dial back on the self-congratulatory, pretentious nonsense. They are helping a few thousand people skip a few ads, not cure cancer or solve world hunger. The breathing at the start. "This is not your typical announcement" while dropping Steve Jobs's name? Vivaldi's Four Seasons? FFS. Just stick to make tab management better. It's a worthy goal. Also still waiting to see how they are gonna make money. A year ago they said they would profit from boosts. Seems like a joke now.

I've been an Arc user for about 9 months now and I really enjoyed the product so far (Spaces is the perfect way for me to manage having so many hobbies/emails/work/school/personal/etc.

I do have a lot of concerns with this level of AI being integrated into the product. There are still so many problems with hallucinations, costs, privacy, and the appropriation of other's content on the web.

In a perfect world, I'd love this feature. But in this world, I understand that it removes any benefit to people who post these recipes or publish the content that Arc's AI will summarize. I get it, some people provide that information as a way to share it openly. But 99% of the web is about making money on clicks, views, interactions, etc. I can't think of a way in today's society that features like this won't erode the ability to have a free and (somewhat) open internet.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39176324 (3 days ago, 8 comments)

I have similar feelings about Arc becoming so tied with AI and that scraping data without showing websites is wrong for internet soul. Feels uncomfortable.

But, so sad that other browsers never put effort on making browser sidebar :( I first enjoyed it with Edge browser but then Arc came and sidebar is incredible. I can't switch to any other browser because of that, I hope they all implement similar (or better) sidebars.

It's not clear how user privacy is handled, Brave is doing some interesting things with their hosting of mixtral => https://brave.com/leo-mixtral/#privacy-always-comes-first

I've been using Arc since June 2023. I really like it as a product. But the communication is a bit overwhelming. Their CEO and team are fairly good to make noise (in the good way) on YouTube, twitter. But I guess I cannot catch up with their frequent release notes and videos.

One of the major takeaways from this video is how there is a major conflict of interest when a browser's predominant income is from the search engine. The browser cannot _truly_ be the User's Agent if innovation can mean killing funding.

Happy to see a feature similar to Live Bookmarks (removed in Firefox 64) returning

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

At the most basic level, for the feature that bypasses the search results and takes the user to the page they probably want, my first thought was that they just reinvented the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

I used it for a few days, and it would spin up the fans on my MacBook Pro after a few minutes. I also wasn’t pleased with the tab management. And then I forgot about it.

My prediction: Arc is irrelevant in five years.