Arc Browser - First Impressions

A breath of fresh air, and a possible cure for tabs mania

Arc is a new web browser with a very fresh approach to what a web browser should be and offer - at least in terms of what I have seen and experienced. Here are a few things that make Arc interesting and useful in my view:

• It’s a possible cure for our tabs mania. The habit some (many?) of us have of constantly having a crazy number of tabs open at once - 10 open tabs, 15, in my case often 25 or more. This can often lead to feelings of stress or pressure; feeling I should have got back to those, should have finished reading or viewing their content.

• Tabs - and folders to organize tabs in - still exist in Arc, but they live in the left sidebar. This may not seem like a major paradigm shift, but it just feels like much less of a distraction, less of a stresser.

• The hierarchy or structure of Arc is also appealing to me. It is:

  • Spaces - a browser equivalent of Mac desktops, or tabs in Windows 10/11

  • Pinned favorites/most visited sites at the top of the sidebar

  • Pinned tabs

  • Current or Today’s tabs

• A nice array of features and keyboard shortcuts to make it easy to focus and even use Arc as a place to be productive and organize our “things” in some ways that may feel more natural, or similar to the way we do outside of browsers.

Right now, Arc is available via invite only in its early days. You can search for Arc browser and enter your email to get on the waitlist to receive an invite. I did that and got an invite within around a week.

I did a quick walk-through video of Arc this morning. I will preface it by saying that I do realize that my video making skills are not great. Perhaps not even good. I don’t have ambitions to become a great video editor or to add bells or whistles to my videos. I do want to improve my voice-over, eliminate or at least reduce the umms and amms, and get that side of things up to scratch.

Having said that, I hope you can still find some use in this mini tour of Arc: