Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web

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

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).

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.

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

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.