Arc (Web Browser)

★★★☆☆

An interesting experiment in finding different ways to use the web, on the idea that people don’t want to use it more, they want to use the web less to accomplish what they want. Arc has a sidebar-based design that encourages organization. It can open a “mini” temporary window that you close when you’re done, or that will close itself after a few hours. Room for a handful of pinned tabs, multiple workspaces, all to keep what’s visible easy to deal with instead of a zillion open tabs or a long list of a zillion bookmarks.

Useful AI?

When browsers like Opera and Brave were jumping on the bandwagon and just tossing AI chatbots into the browser for the sake of buzz, Arc was adding small AI features to do useful tasks, like generating link previews with summaries, shortening long titles so you can see something meaningful on the tab, or organizing your downloads. Unfortunately these “Max” features still require calling out to a remote service to do it.

Customization

It’s built on Chromium, and can run most Chrome extensions, but has no concept of bookmarks. If you import bookmarks from another browser, you get them as pinned tabs.

You can create a “boost” for a website which modifies its appearance. Arc gives you a color scheme map, some font options, and the ability to hide (or “zap”) elements, or you can write custom CSS or JavaScript for a particular site. Early in the beta, back when boosts were entirely JavaScript, I used one to create a pair of buttons to fill in for the Wayback Machine bookmarklets. If I stick with Arc for a while, I may do something similar to add an item to Postmarks.

Where

I used Arc regularly on macOS for several months and multiple releases, but lost interest by the time they finally released a version for Windows 10. (For a while there I was seriously wondering if they’d end up postponing until after the October 2025 end of support and just stick with Windows 11. Also: There’s no Linux version, and it doesn’t run on Wine.) I came back to it to refresh my memory and see what’s new since then, and also to compare it to Zen, which is building a similar browser on top of Firefox instead of Chromium.

There is a mobile app, Arc Search, which is different enough from both the desktop version and other Android browsers that I think I need to use it more to get a good handle on what it’s like.

Late last year, Arc went into maintenance mode. It’s still getting bug fixes, but all new feature work is going into the next browser the company plans to release, Dia, sometime in 2025.

Weirdly enough, Arc still requires you to sign into an account just to use it, instead of waiting until you’re actually going to use their online services. Early in the closed beta, when you needed to sign up just to download it, that made sense, but now? Why bother?