Baby Steps Forward in the Web Browser User Experience (Premium)

Confronted by the innovative Arc browser one year ago, I wondered aloud whether this deep rethinking of the web browser user experience would stick or if Big Tech would simply circle the wagons, as always, and suffocate this latest intrusion into its market dominance.

Since then, the situation has evolved.

We’ve had good alternative web browsers for years, from second-tier entries like Edge, Safari, and Firefox, to third-tier entries like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi. But it seems like we’re suddenly awash in even smaller, more niche browser offerings that threaten to dilute this market, much like the advent of cable TV and then streaming did with television. That is, browsing the web may no longer be the shared experience it once was.

And with AI making inexorable inroads of its own, the web and the browsers we navigate it with are suddenly changing yet again. In fact, we may not really “browse” the web going forward, with AI doing the heavy lifting to pull the information we need out of the vast morass of web-based data as our ability and desire to read further devolves.

And that’s just on the desktop. Looking at mobile–which is much bigger as a market and no doubt bigger still by actual usage–things get even murkier. When we look for answers on the go, we often want them to be concise and to the point, not a back and forth conversation as we see with AI chatbots or a long list of links we can studiously research as in a desktop web browser.

And then there’s this little bombshell. The innovator that triggered my meanderings about web browser user experience one year has since given up on that app: The Browser Company revealed in December that it would no longer add new features to the Arc browser, but would instead work on a reimagined AI browser called Dia with a simpler, new user experience. And since then, established browser makers, most notably Google, have discussed similar ideas–one might say, suspiciously similar ideas–about how their existing products might evolve to automate many of the tasks we use them for. As AI enters its agentic era, it’s perhaps only natural that browsers, the primary conduit through which we access those AIs, would evolve as well.

The optimist’s view of this is that it’s finally happening, in a way. That is, I was wondering why the web browser, as the most important app we use every day, has been stuck with the same fundamental user experience since its inception. But now AI is doing what it does, disrupting this product and bringing new capabilities that today still read like science fiction.

A more cynical reading of this evolution betrays some inconvenient truths. Smaller browser makers like Opera, DuckDuckGo, Brave, and others have been pushing AI capabilities aggressively for years now, but these changes haven’t led to a market shift of any kind. When Google, Microsoft, and Apple add AI to their browsers, which collectively account for almost 90 percent of all usage on desktop and on mobile, all they’re really doing is protecting their relative positions in the market. They’re doing what Big Tech does. Not innovating, but rather making sure that they’re offering what the real innovators offer so no one jumps ship.

And no one has jumped ship. Almost literally.

• Chrome’s overall (desktop and mobile) usage share right now is 66.3 percent, compared to 65.3 percent one year ago, a change of 1.5 percent.
• Safari’s overall usage share is 17.99 percent, compared to 18.3 percent, which is statistically unchanged.
• And Edge usage share is 5.33 percent overall, compared to 5.07 one year ago. Another statistical tie.

In other words, the status has been quoed. Or something.

If you look at the usage of other browsers, all you see are straight, overlapping lines at the bottom of the usage chart, like straw on the floor of a barn, each indistinguishable from the others. And that’s a shame. Because it is in that straw, so to speak, where innovation will occur. We just have to notice it.

Here’s the good news: Switching to a different browser, even just trying a different browser, is about as frictionless as such a thing can be. It doesn’t hurt, it isn’t difficult or time-consuming, and going back to the familiar confines or whatever browser you currently use, happens instantly, with no harm and no foul. Most alternative browsers don’t require the learning curve that Arc browser did, with the notable exception of the Firefox-based Zen browser that rips off the Arc user experience even more egregiously than Loop does to Notion. (One could successfully argue that Zen is mostly appealing to former Arc users, too, and in that case, there is a smaller learning curve.)

I routinely test other web browsers, and while this is true of many apps and even OS platforms, it’s possible that I spend more time using alternative browsers than I do anything else. That makes sense: As noted, web browsers are the most important app we use–the most popular or most-often-used app, however you wish to say it–and they are, for many, the viewport through which we experience the world each day. It’s one of the few things that’s as true on mobile as it is on the desktop.

Recently, I wrote a seemingly unimportant and innocuous post about experimenting with my smartphone home screen layout (and then a follow-up yesterday). I debated even posting that because I felt like some readers would roll their eyes at such a mundane topic. But user experience matters. I care about efficiency quite a bit. And how we interact with our phones, that most personal of personal technology devices, is arguably important on some level. There are some similarities, of course, but we use phones differently than we use PCs. We often perform short, explicit tasks on phones, in little bursts, where we likewise often perform longer, more focused tasks on PCs. And I had been wondering whether whatever layouts I had created on my phones and iPad even made sense given how I use these things.

I have similar questions with the PCs I use every day. And, as it turns out, with web browsers. And on that note, I’ve been wondering whether certain user experience advances I see occurring, mostly with what I’d call third-tier browsers–the Operas and Vivaldis of the world, if you will–or, now, even lower in the food chain. Again, this is where innovation typically occurs first.

Put another way, I’ve been wondering whether there are baby steps one could take to improve efficiency in web browsers ahead of the presumed shift to agentic web browsers that browse for you. I imagine a future in which some coming generation ponders why these apps are even called “browsers” since they won’t be using them to “browse” anything. But that’s for future Paul. Is there anything out there now that can improve this experience without otherwise screwing up this most familiar of tools?

I think there is. Maybe.

It’s not fully baked yet, and the implementation varies by browser on a scale that goes from nonexistent to potentially very interesting. But you are surely familiar with browser sidebars, and are likely at least passingly familiar with the notion that some of them can host “apps,” for lack of a better term. And that these apps, however they’re implemented, can be accessed alongside whatever content you’re currently–wait for it–browsing.

It’s reasonable to be dismissive of a browser sidebar. This does not seem innovative. And most aren’t all that interesting. Microsoft, for example, uses the Edge sidebar to push Copilot and a bewildering array of services both useful and not. To many, this looks and feels like clutter. The Chrome sidebar, which Google calls the side panel, is even less useful, almost pointless: It’s just a UI for browser features like Reading list, Bookmarks, and History, and though there’s an API, few extensions support it in any meaningful way.

Bear with me for a moment. There are sidebars and there are sidebars. And on the suddenly very interesting end of that spectrum, there are sidebars like the one in Opera that hosts (what it calls) apps, typically those for services whose primary interactions are notification-based rather than things you might sit there and interact with over time. Messaging services and social media services, for example. In many cases, these are things that can sit in the background, doing nothing, that spring to life only when something happens. And when something happens, they deliver a notification.

And that is very interesting. Potentially.

We all work differently. In my case, I configure whatever web browser I’m using at the time (on desktop) identically. This identical configuration includes things like the default search engine and the extensions I use. But it also includes the default tab layout. This has evolved over time, and it will continue evolving, but right now, I have several tabs pinned to the main browser window–for Gmail, Google Calendar, Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and Eternal Spring–and each is, when you think about it, a notification-driven service. These are things I check in the morning, but then interact with largely through notifications throughout the day.

The problems with pinned tabs are many. No browser maker syncs these things between installs, so I have to manually recreate them when I switch between browsers or PCs. (This is a “me” problem, for sure. But I test a lot of browsers.) They take up resources in the app that is already consuming more resources than any app most of us use. They’re easy to close by mistake. And so on.

If I could remove those pinned tabs and replace them with sidebar apps, it’s possible that I could be more efficient. It would free up some space in the tab bar. Free up some much-needed resources in the browser. Maybe even help me focus.

These kinds of workflow changes are as difficult to imagine as they are to do. Maybe they’re even more difficult if you’re particular about things, as I am. For example, I have a similarly standard layout for pinned Taskbar apps in Windows 11. And there are apps like Slack and Teams (previously Skype) that are important and so I had been pinning them to my Taskbar. But it occurred to me that there were other ways to deal with these apps. And that I could free up space on the Taskbar, which would be visually less cluttered, presumably leading to some vague calmness.

For example, I could rely on my phone. I have these apps on my phone, they ring a notification when something happens, and I could handle those on that device or, if necessary, then launch the app on the PC.

Or. I could still use the apps on the PC, let them run in the background at startup, but not pin them to the Taskbar. They could just notify me directly when something happened. I’ve tried both, and I’ve mostly moved to the second of those methods. But this is an example of trying to get past a set way of doing something, rethinking it to see whether there’s a better way.

A browser sidebar could work similarly for the web. The trick is finding one that offers the same services I’m currently pinning. And to date, that does not exist. But this is why the recent Opera announcement about Bluesky, Discord, and Slack was so interesting to me. I use Slack and Bluesky every day (the former with a standalone app) and Discord during Windows Weekly each week. If enough of these types of services I use work in a browser sidebar, maybe that becomes a viable alternative to what I’m doing now. Email and calendar too.

I might be missing something, but Opera is most likely the best choice for this type of thing right now. (If you know of a browser with similar sidebar app capabilities, I’m listening.) Combine that functionality with the minimalist vibe of the recently released Opera Air, which offers identical sidebar app functionality, and now we’re talking. Assuming Opera can ever close the loop on a more complete list of sidebar-based apps. Or some other browser maker.

The more I think about this, the better this idea seems. It just hasn’t come together yet, at least not completely.