So, for anyone using Arc, Arc 1.0 now seems to be dead in the water and will receive no new features, only stability fixes; the company has scrapped what they have worked on for months (!) as the redesign and eventually v2, and now they aim to develop an entirely new browser (lots of buzzwords there, little concrete stuff). I guess venture capital wants some returns, and The Browser Company is not providing any as of now, so they’re trying to pivot to something.
The messaging around this is altogether so confusing and out of touch (including the CEO’s post on X where he envisions building a series of browsers and comparing themselves to Apple who have a family of products) that I suppose for anyone using Arc, other browsers should be considered.
I’ll probably return to Edge, which I have always been perfectly happy with on the Mac, but I’m also re-testing Vivaldi.
This is good news! The 2.0 product design from earlier this year sounded like a mistake, reading between the lines on the podcast, and they were planning on upgrading all 1.0 users to 2.0. I’d been thinking I’d have to leave Arc when 2.0 launched until you posted this.
I see Jason Fried’s influence more than VC money though they of course do want an order of magnitude more users. Keeping major versions around, being willing to consider an idea complete, pushing for simoler expressions of the essential idea…
I wouldn’t say the rewrite trap applies to new design work and making a separate product. Saying that as someone who has sent the old Spolsky essay around a few times.
Whew. I’m relieved that Arc 1.0 will remain mostly as it is since it’s an important part of my Walled Garden of Intentional Internet. Safari and Firefox are for Quotidian Internet and SurferNet. I’m in the process of fine-tuning five separated workspaces. If they do nothing else with Arc but keep it working on each OS update, that’s fine by me. I’d probably even pay for it.
I see a couple of problems there. They are operating and trying to invent something new in an exceptionally crowded and saturated market where the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft control 94% of the market (leaving 2% to each of Mozilla, Samsung, and Opera).
They’d be fortunate to have one browser to gain traction, yet their CEO imagines a line of browser ‘products’. A line of products for which people typically do not pay, with a heavy focus on AI where at least two companies behind the major browsers are way ahead of them (Google, Microsoft), and possibly also a third one (Apple).
They have now essentially sunsetted the primary product they’ve been working on, only to pivot in a very unclear direction.
This all reads like they hope to be bought out for their design work, re-thinking of a browser, etc. It’s not the actual product or product income they’re after.
Arc is supposed to address the issues of having too many tabs. But, I find myself in anxiety over trying to remember what I had opened since I can’t see much of the tabs in Arc. In Safari, I could press a button and have a grid view of all the open pages to choose from. I gave Arc a few chances but find myself going back to Safari.
I uninstalled Arc a week ago and switched to using chrome (as my 2nd browser, and safari as my my browser) because I decided that it was causing me a similar stress, even though I only had a few tabs open in it. Interesting that you had a similar but different reaction.
Well, they have already stood out and they’re not sunsetting the browser, and they’re backing off of the AI focus of the 2.0 browser, and the two browsers will share Chromium and architecture under the UI, and pushing design further while maintaining something people really like is not something you do if you only care about acquisition. All promising.
The big question is: can the browser market support a company that constantly pushes design, and that can’t offer a browser as a loss leader? I don’t see a yes answer for that yet. However, I think there never can be a yes answer until a really good, independent browser maker tries hard and gets lucky.