According to the App Store listing, the iOS browser will let sync your desktop tabs and Spaces (read: groups of tabs, user accounts, and pinned sites), and you’ll be able to view your whiteboard-esque Easels and notes. You’ll also be able to share links to Arc that’ll be saved for you to read later.
The interesting thing is that it’s not clear that this is a mobile browser at all. It appears to be a static viewer/companion to whatever is on the desktop. (Otherwise I assume with current iOS rules, they would have had to build all the same features on top of WebKit.)
I predict a lot of confusion and disappointment on Thursday. (But maybe I’m wrong)
So, this thing is cute. @ciaran had it partly right: it’s, at its core, a way to get at your Arc spaces and tabs and to save things to them. However, it does let you open new tabs, browse and search, interact with/click through pages, find on page etc. It seems like a fairly basic Webview wrapper and it’s not performance-optimized like iOS Safari’s.
Super chunky buttons (in a good way) and it feels great to swipe through spaces.
I haven’t figured out how to share to it from Safari yet (I’m not ready to make it a default browser, if that’s even an option.)
It’s a good start. I like the UI and interactions. It’s missing a lot, sure, but I’m excited to see how they improve it in the future. I’m just going to use it to send URLs to desktop Arc for now.
Hit the share button in Safari
Scroll all the way to the right in the share sheet
Looks okay on my iPad mini. Presumably a native iPad app is in the pipeline. The iPad and Mac are where I do my heavy-duty web browsing, not so much the iPhone.
You’re right, the article lists everything that syncs and it doesn’t list favorites. I’d mentally grouped favorites into pinned tabs so overlooked that.
It sounds like they think of favorites more as a phone-style grid of app icons, so didn’t think they were needed on the phone. Fortunately they’re reconsidering since many people are asking for them to sync.
Got a bit of “hew home where is all my stuff” scenario but after seeing how Default and Personal profiles work and setting it up I was confident enough to delete Brave and Vivaldi and make Arc my default browser for now. For some reason Safari is just not liking my aging 2015 iMac 27 or it would still be my default just for the iOS/Mac sync stuff. Again …appreciate it and timing was right because I was dl the companion app right before my setup was complete.
If Safari could be set up so that tab groups functioned more like Arc’s sidebar, I’d be using use Safari for everything. (I don’t care about the clippings or easels or the rest of it). The biggest impediment so far is that if you hide the address bar in Safari, you cannot use command-L or any other incantation to type in a new website address.