The Browser Company to “Radically Reinvent” Arc Browser

Admitting its Arc browser is too complicated for most users, The Browser Company has made the radical decision to start over. It will continue supporting the current web browser while building a “brand-new product” that’s closer to its vision for the future of the web, one that may or may not even be marketed as a browser.

“We spent months radically redesigning Arc [as] Arc 2.0, this big idea,” Arc cofounder and CEO Josh Miller says in a YouTube update. “But we came to a realization about a week or two ago [that] Arc doesn’t need a redesign. Arc doesn’t need a radical reinvention. Arc’s great as it is.”

The “realization” Miller describes is one I came to many months ago, as did most people who have tried this browser: For whatever subset of the user base, Arc is exactly what they’re looking for, a different way to browse the web and interact with content online. But for most people, the product is too complex, and too different from the web browser norm, and they give up and go back to whatever they were using previously.

“I’ve got near and dear friends in my life [and] family members that I just couldn’t get to use Arc,” Miller admits. “These are people with a bajillion tabs open. They should love the thing we’ve built. But it was just too complicated for them. It was intimidating. We didn’t start this company for the sake of a sidebar and spaces and pin tabs, we started this company to build something for the people that we love.”

Miller says that Arc usage has quadrupled this year, but at that level of growth, it’s never going to reach one billion people. (Say what you will about The Browser Company, but it certainly has audacious goals.) And so this “very small group of people who had no business working on a browser” is starting over. The existing Arc browser “is not going anywhere,” Miller says, mostly because the people who do use it, love it so much and don’t want it to change. But his company is going to build a new product. And yes, it will lean heavily on AI, much like the Arc Search mobile app. Or, nothing like that. It’s hard to say.

“We have fallen in love with language models and the potential of them,” Miller says after describing his initial skepticism, “We have a bajillion idea for how we can use these LLMs to make web browsing better. And this Transformer [the basis for the current AI boom] is I think going to change the way we use software on the Internet for the better. And I know what you’re thinking. But this is also part of the reason we felt we needed to redesign Arc. The world is about to change. We think it can be for the better, but we got to think from a blank page.”

Miller doesn’t provide a lot of information about this new product that doesn’t even have a name yet. But he compares the basic idea behind it as being comparable to a self-driving car, where it will simply do what you need without you having to manually manage it. He talks about the evolution of the Cmd + T shortcut (on the Mac, Ctrl + T for most people), and how it used to summon the Address bar but changed to the New Tab with Chrome; Arc browser changed this yet again to be a sort of quick launcher, and it seems like this new product will be centered on this shortcut as well. Finally, there is an agent-like aspect to this, a background service that works on your behalf that makes the product automatic where Arc today is manual. Familiar and powerful, and not just novel and different.

I need more details. But I love the idea of reimagining how we browse the web. Web browsers aren’t just important, they’re the most important app on our PCs, the one most users use more than any other app, or even all other apps combined. But they’re also all the same from a user experience perspective, and that’s as true on the minimalist Safari/Brave end of the spectrum as it is on the busy Opera/Vivaldi end and everywhere in-between.

Will The Browser Company deliver on this? That’s impossible to say. But it’s clear that real innovation in this space isn’t going to come from the dominant companies and other established players that make up this market. It’s going to come from an outsider, a new player with no legacy or market to protect.

Whatever happens, I like to see an overt effort like this to rethink things and not get stuck on an idea that works for some but not for others. This feels healthy, even though some of the marketing and messaging is a bit grating and even twee. But maybe that’s the point. Miller and his team are thinking outside the box. We need more of this: Not change for change’s sake, but an attempt to make things better.