Price:
Invite Only
There’s a new browser called Arc on the block that promises to be “everything you care about, all in one place.” Hype and secrecy aside, Arc implements a few smart changes and features that might just tempt you to jump ship from Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
Here’s What We Like
- Some great new ideas and features
- Proactive tab management forces you to keep things tidy
- Spaces help organize tabs, profiles keep login data separate
- Easels and Notes for scrapbooking and note-taking
And What We Don’t
- UI and tab management won’t be to everyone’s tastes
- Chrome extensions don’t always work as advertised
- Not the smoothest web browsing experience, despite good benchmark results
- Privacy lacking out of the box
- Energy impact and CPU usage are concerning
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What Is the Arc Browser?
Arc is a web browser that, at the time of writing, is currently invite-only. Though a Windows version is on the horizon for some time in 2023, Arc is currently only available for macOS (using a universal binary that runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel models).
Once you’ve signed up, waited, and received your invite, you’ll be asked to download and install Arc. The setup process is a bit different from your average browser, complete with a 90s-style splash screen that invites you to “Meet the internet again,” an invitation to use an ad-blocker right away, and a mandatory account creation process.
Arc is the work of The Browser Company of New York, which promises that your account is only used to sync Arc data between instances. Arc makes use of theming, inviting you to pick a color during the setup process, which you’ll later find out is used as a means of organization.
With the setup process out of the way, you’ll find yourself staring at Arc’s slightly unorthodox UI for the first time. In Arc, everything lives in a sidebar to the left of the screen. This includes the URL bar, tab list, favorites, and navigation. You can choose to hide the sidebar with the click of a button, though it pops back up as soon as you hover over the left side of the window.
Underneath it all, Arc is a fork of Chromium. Its guts are largely the same as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, though it lacks some of the polish applied to the more established browsers like Chrome’s Memory Saver or Energy Saver. Unlike Edge, Arc uses Google as its default search engine.
What Does Arc Do Differently?
So far, so browser. But Arc brings a lot to the table in terms of reinventing how a browser works, and what sort of features you should expect to have. Probably the biggest is a Spotlight-style interface for accessing pretty much every browser feature.
For the unaware, Spotlight is Apple’s very convenient macOS search feature that you can use to launch applications, find files using natural language, perform sums and calculations, and more. Arc includes a similar feature when opening a new tab (Command+T) or accessing the URL bar (Command+L).
In addition to being a universal search and URL bar, you can use the feature to do things like “Pin tab” simply by typing. Typed commands like “View History” and “Duplicate Current Tab” let you interact with the browser without taking your fingers off the keyboard. You can even move and switch tabs in this way.
Tab management in Arc is proactive, and by default, any tabs that you don’t pin will be closed after 12 hours. You can change this within the app settings (the maximum time is 30 days). The browser has a separate space for pinned tabs (above) and “Today’s tabs” (below), with a “Clear” button you can click at any time to get rid of your old tabs.
Arc lets you create “Spaces” to organize your tabs, which is a feature that Safari also uses. You can swipe between spaces as you would navigate backwards and forwards on a web page. Each space can have its own theme, and tabs can be shifted between spaces as you need. You can also apply profiles within themes, which allows you to associate different browser data with different spaces (useful for switching between personal and professional accounts simply by changing space).
The browser also acts as a scrapbook using an Easel feature. By starting a new easel, you can create a canvas that can be collaborated upon with other Arc users or shared for anyone to view on the web. Add screenshots to easels from any webpage using the “Camera” icon in the URL bar that automatically link back to the source URL. You can also add text, shapes, drawings, and more.
Arc also functions as a notebook; just start a “New Note” using the new tab interface. You can share these notes over the web, or simply keep them organized within your browser using folders and spaces. You can add pictures, links, create lists, and format your text as you would expect, and everything syncs using your Arc account.
The Browser Company of New York has also included a few tweaks on existing ideas, like Split View. This works similarly to Split View found in macOS, allowing you to arrange four tabs across a single window. You can do something similar in other browsers using multiple windows, but Arc does a better job of keeping split tabs together by tying them to your spaces.
A feature called Boosts lets to make changes to the websites you visit. Tweak a web page by changing its style, replacing content, injecting code, or customizing the underlying code to change how a website behaves. Other browsers can use extensions to achieve this (like Stylebot for Chrome), but Arc includes the functionality out of the box. It also walks you through some of the simpler operations.
Other UI tweaks are accessible with a drag on the sidebar, offering a dedicated tab for Downloads, your Easels and Notes, Spaces you have created, Archived Tabs, and a Media tab that pulls in recent images from the Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders in macOS.
Arc also features a Mini Player that places video in a pop-out window when you navigate away from a tab and provides playback controls within the sidebar for audio.
What Arc Hopes to Achieve
Arc introduces a lot of good ideas, but they’re not going to appeal to everyone in equal measure. The browser is gunning for a less cluttered browsing experience, where you spend less time sifting through open tabs and more time making conscious decisions about the websites on which you spend your time.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the way the browser “aggressively” manages your tabs. If you don’t decide to keep a website around by pinning it, Arc will close that website for you. There’s no option to turn this off, you can only extend a tab’s potential lifespan.
Through this, you should achieve better organization. Using spaces (and tying login credentials to profiles within those spaces) lets you keep things separate. Arc isn’t the only browser to do this, but its use of color and quick switching is probably the most playful implementation I’ve seen yet. You can also add icons to your tabs, folders, easels, and more, with a full suite of emojis at your disposal.
By forcing you to clean up, you might be more inclined to use features like Arc’s easels. So-called “magic screenshots” that link back to websites are bound to appeal to visual organizers who love mind-mapping and brainstorming. Collaborating on these canvasses is another compelling idea, but one that will need Arc to become more widespread in order to succeed.
Arc feels like a browser that wants to save you time and remove barriers. Tab previews allow you to hover over websites like Gmail, Outlook, and GitHub to see unread messages, events, and pull requests without having to focus on a tab. In addition to the Spotlight-like navigation, there’s a huge range of customizable keyboard shortcuts to get acquainted with.
Tying your Split View preferences to pinned tab sets within spaces means not having to arrange windows manually all of the time. Take notes using Arc’s built-in notebook with a tab that’s pinned to another. Keep sets of tabs within the same window, which is handy if you use dashboards, chat apps, and other at-a-glance websites.
But for the “don’t touch my tabs” hoarders that keep everything open, just in case, Arc may not impress. Even though a push might be what you need to kick your ugly tab habit, the idea that your browser is coming for your tabs might just put you off. It may bring you some comfort to know that you can always find tabs that Arc has removed under the “Archived Tabs” area and get them back with a click.
How Well Does Arc Perform?
As noted, Arc is a Chromium-based browser. It uses the same rendering engine as Google and Microsoft’s flagship browsers, which means it scored favorably in many of the benchmarks I ran on my M1 Max 2021 MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM.
In use, Arc is mostly fine. While pages load quickly, scrolling web pages and expanding hidden content simply isn’t as smooth on my test machine as it is in Safari or Firefox. It’s far from unusable (and probably worth persevering with if you find Arc’s overall feature set agreeable), but pages stuttered and flickered in a way that detracts from the overall browsing experience.
The browser seemed to sip a fair bit of CPU even while lying dormant in the background. While Safari eventually settles and uses very little power, Arc seems to be constantly at work. According to Activity Monitor, Arc had around a third of the “12 hr Power” energy footprint of Safari, though Safari had considerably more tabs open and was being used more intensely. Arc consistently had a higher energy impact during my monitoring. This suggests that Arc would drain your battery faster than using Safari alone.
Arc is also far from perfect when it comes to privacy. Though Do Not Track is enabled by default and the browser offers to block ads out of the gate (by installing uBlock Origin), the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cover Your Tracks test reports that the browser isn’t blocking tracking ads or invisible trackers. This makes it about as good as Chrome and Edge, much worse than Firefox, and marginally worse than Safari, even with ad-blocking enabled.
Since Arc is a fork of Chromium, it can use Chrome extensions just like Edge and other browsers within the family. Head to the Chrome Web Store and click “Add to Chrome” to add extensions to Arc, then access them via the Extensions menu (or use the Command+T or Command+L interface).
Many extensions work just fine, but others do not. I couldn’t log in to Google Keep, with the extension instead returning an error. Plus, there’s no way to pin an extension to Arc’s sidebar as you can with the Chrome or Edge toolbar. This makes accessing features a little more cumbersome.
If you’re going to embrace Arc as your primary browser, a mobile version is pretty important. Though there’s no “full fat” mobile version of Arc, there is the Arc Mobile Companion for iPhone. You can search and visit websites using the Search bar, access spaces and recent tabs, and even pin new tabs. Unfortunately, though, you can’t set Arc as a default browser as you can Firefox or Chrome.
Should You Try Out the Arc Browser?
Arc has some excellent ideas and the confidence to lean into them. Proactive tab management is designed to prevent the sort of tab build-up that many of us fall victim to. The UI is different, but the more you use it, the more it makes sense. Being able to pin tabs, reload pages, and organize things using text commands will put a smile on your face if you’re as fond of macOS Spotlight and apps like Alfred as we are.
The Arc browser feels like it needs a bit more polish to deliver a silky smooth browsing experience. It would also be nice for it to be as proactive with privacy as it is with tab management, though if you’re coming from Chrome, there are no real downsides in this department.
At the time of writing, Arc is invite-only and free to use. If you like the sound of its management and organizational features, can see a use for easels and a note-taking app that’s linked to your browser, and can live with a “companion” mobile browser, then you shouldn’t hesitate to give it a shot.
Price:
Invite Only
Here’s What We Like
- Some great new ideas and features
- Proactive tab management forces you to keep things tidy
- Spaces help organize tabs, profiles keep login data separate
- Easels and Notes for scrapbooking and note-taking
And What We Don’t
- UI and tab management won’t be to everyone’s tastes
- Chrome extensions don’t always work as advertised
- Not the smoothest web browsing experience, despite good benchmark results
- Privacy lacking out of the box
- Energy impact and CPU usage are concerning
