The Browser Company Answers Your Questions About Arc for Windows

In a video posted this morning, The Browser Company answered the most commonly asked questions about its Arc browser for Windows. Which, as you probably know, was released in 1.0 form just two days ago. It also provided a lot of additional information about the app and its future.

The first and most obvious question is, why is this only for Windows 11? And when will Arc support Windows 10? To that, Arc says only that it is a small team, they started with Windows 11, Windows 10 will be supported “soon.”

As to feature parity with Mac, I found this answer perhaps the most interesting. Obviously, the company plans to beef up the support of features on Windows, but it will also “pare down” Arc for Mac. That is, “there are a few [features] in the Mac app that maybe have no place in it anymore. It’s about finding the balance between ‘What’s Arc on Windows?’ and ‘What’s Arc on Mac?’ and then, ‘What’s Arc?’.

Now that Arc for Windows has shipped in stable, The Browser Company is brainstorming what comes next, as both its desktop web browser versions will now move forward in tandem. This bit is somewhat vague, but it will clearly involve AI, with the exact features, and released in what order, to be determined. The company had previously announced something called Arc Max as an AI-inspired take on the web browser. But it seems that perhaps the best ideas in Max will make their way into Arc now. This is unclear.

One of the many interesting aspects to Arc is that it was created using the Swift programming language, which is common on Apple’s platforms but not so much on Windows. This is controversial in some circles, but The Browser Company says it has “no doubt” that using Swift was the right call. Once you create an app using Swift on the Mac, they say, building it for Windows and deploying it can happen “pretty quickly.” Arc is now the most sophisticated Swift app on Windows, the company claims. (The second most sophisticated is a calculator app, so I guess the bar is pretty low.)

From a design standpoint, the company says that Arc for Windows is not a basic port of the Mac app. Instead, the design reflects how Windows apps look and work on that platform, especially in the title bar–which they refer to as “the top bar”–which has to reflect the lack of the system-wide menu found on the Mac.

Browser performance is top of mind for Arc for Windows right now, and the company cites the diversity of the Windows PC ecosystem as a key challenge there.

And of course, people are asking about Arc for Android, which The Browser Company mentioned in passing when it launched on Windows. To this, they will only say “soon,” and note again that they are looking for talented Android engineers. So not much on that front, sadly.

“We’re not done,” The Browser Company CTO and co-founder Hursh Agrawal says. “We’re just getting started.”