Does Arc browser solve a problem?
When you optimise building for feeling
We review products from the prism of how well they solve the problem they state they’re solving, for the people they’re stating they’re solving for.
This week it’s Arc’s turn, a web browser I’ve been daily-driving on Mac and iPhone (called Arc Search on iOS) for a few months.
What problem is Arc solving?
The Browser Company (creators of Arc) state that browsers have stagnated. The internet, which browsers are the gateway to, has evolved, but browsers have largely remained the same. The majority of browsers follow the same cookie cutter UI with slight variations and levels of inherent clutter. That cookie cutter UI which defaults to tabs displayed at the top, which decrease in width the more tabs you open (until you can’t tell what each tab is), makes these browsers easily become cluttered and hard to manage the longer your usage session lasts. Worse, the internet has quickly become AD and SEO centric rather than human centric, with websites and content optimised for search engine crawlers and to maximise ad unit impressions. This makes finding information a mini maze that people have to navigate (think of recipe pages with entire life stories occupying 90% of the page with the bottom 10% being reserved for the actual recipe).
Who is it for?
The majority of users either don’t bother replacing their default browser or if they do, it’s likely to be Chrome (65% market share). Trying out new browsers comes to a small niche of users that are technical enough to care. A small subset of the small subset will care more about trying new UX patterns and will appreciate the design and energy behind Arc.
Is Arc making browsing the internet feel more organised?
Straight up yes! Arc has a host of features that help you organise your tabs. Arc is built around spaces, a sort of collection of folders and links that can fit a theme like “Work”, “Personal” or “Entertainment”. In each space you can create folders that have their own search interface and also have a section for ephemeral tabs that get deleted after a certain time in order to declutter your browser. Arc also gives users the option to automatically organise links into folders based on their content. All this certainly may help some organise, but for me, spaces and folders much like bookmarks in other browsers end up becoming link graveyards.
Where Arc shines and makes browsing feel organised is when it gets out of the way. Arc supports hiding tabs and any other elements, showing only the page I’m on. Arc lets you navigate via an in-built spotlight search like experience that activates with CMD+T and acts as a search for existing tabs you have saved (see spaces and folders) or as a search bar sending queries directly to a search engine like duckduckgo or google. Arc also helps reduce the need to open a new tab by giving me page previews that open like a dismissible pop up on top of the page I clicked the link from. I can quickly get the information I need, decide I need to read more and open as a full tab or figure out this isn’t the link I’m looking for.
Is Arc making browsing the internet feel less like a maze?
It’s a good start and certainly is closer than any other browser but something is missing for me to find utility.
Arc gives you a lot of options that help remove some of the obstacles but ends up replacing them with a few (fewer) of its own. Arc has 8 different features, powered by LLMs, that are designed to reduce the work required to get from query to answer. Arc integrates with chatGPT and Perplexity, Arc can search Google on your behalf in the background and summarise the top results on iOS which you can read yourself or have Arc summarise for you through voice, Arc can open the top result for you or can create a folder containing multiple tabs with links returned by google on desktop. It can give you a short summary of the contents of a link returned by a search engine and can help you ask an LLM specific questions about the contents presented in a tab.
The solutions Arc provides are generally good for the same type of queries demoed in every other LLM-powered product like perplexity or humane AI pin. LLM answers work great for fact-based questions that have a single answer like how many feet in a meter or what’s the capital of Tajikistan. This type of question represents sub 10% of the queries I make. 45% of my search queries revolve around questions that don’t have one simple answer, the answer is split in bits and pieces across multiple links like coding-related questions. Remaining queries are browsing and discovery-centric and less about a definitive answer like searching for holiday destinations, hotels and places to visit is a process that requires multiple small decisions that I want to make myself. I don’t want a statistical model that serves up a ready-made itinerary. In the limited 10% of fact-based queries Arc’s LLM features may or may not hit the mark, and one miss is enough to make me default to the usual Google-centric browsing behavior. Further, search defaults to a traditional search engine so using these LLM features requires the user to make a deliberate choice. A choice which is not obvious and creates additional cognitive load as most of the time I’m not sure if I need a single search result, a collection of results to browse through or a summary.
Conclusion
Revolutionising browsing is a hard UX, UI and technical problem given the internet already has a predefined shape. It requires risk taking, experimentation and energy which The Browser Company exudes with as far as I can derive from their building in public type content. Arc is a breath of fresh air in the browser space and made me excited about browsers again. Arc’s most recent launch of “Call Arc”, a very clever way to get you to want to talk to a personal assistant in public without feeling weird is a perfect example of this. Arc feels like the browser Apple should have made (sorry Safari) and makes browsing the internet feel more premium and tidy. It still doesn’t quite hit the mark on reducing time from query to answer for me, but to be honest, I don’t feel like it’s a problem I need solved right away.