After a couple of weeks on the waitlist, I eventually got my invite. I’m never encouraged by this approach; either they’ve got the back-end resource to support their product in the wild, which includes beta testing, or they do not. That they want to constrain their userbase to those people interested enough in browsers (which are the OS equivalent of office desks, carpets and chairs - important, yes, but you’ve already got one, it probably works well enough, and if it doesn’t, you already know about it and are sorting out a replacement) is not, in my view, a positive.
So, the application itself is nice enough. It has a funky icon. It launches quickly on my 2021 M1 MBP. It has a sidebar (this is very, very similar to Vertical Tabs in Edge, except you don’t get a choice about it) and it organises things into “Spaces” (not dissimilar to Edge’s Tab Groups). The sidebar is the basic foundation for organising your stuff. If you hide the sidebar, there’s no button to get it back. You either press ⌘-S, or choose it off the View menu, or poke your pointer at the left side of the screen and hope you’ve not got an iPad in Continuity mode there so you miss and start activating control centre on the iPad and you get mad – OK, this could just be me.
As an Edge user, with the aforementioned Tab Groups and Vertical Tabs available to me, I’m not really sure what problem Arc is solving here. It’s certainly solving the problem of what to do with all my pixels - the interface has a lot of padding and empty space. There’s a “Little Arc” thing which is basically a small new window. Not sure this needed pulling out into a feature all of its own, but I guess someone might find it useful.
The real issue is that Spaces are just groups of /favourites/bookmarks/folders, and you can hop between these groups. I kinda get what they’re going for here - a better way to organise a lot of browser tabs - but the way it’s introduced (narrator: it was not introduced at all) means most people will simply stay in their first Space, and at that point you’re better off in your existing browser, where you know how to use everything and all your stuff exists and it’s got all your extensions and passwords and extensions that remember your passwords already.
There are some UI wrinkles here, too. When you create a Space, it appears at the top of your sidebar. So you click it. And you’re renaming your space and setting the icon. No, to change Spaces, you need to click the icon (and it’s just an icon) at the bottom of the sidebar. If you don’t set a custom icon, you just end up with several dots representing your Spaces. You can hover over these to get a tooltip with the Space name. Also, if you set your Sidebar to be too narrow, your custom icons turn off and it’s all dots. This is all a bit clunky.
As for browsing? It’s a Chromium browser. It works. It supports Chromium extensions.
I’m sure some people will find Arc to be very useful. It doesn’t gel with the way I work in a browser. I think a larger problem is the requirement for an Arc account providing no obvious benefits. The sync option is to iCloud - so all I’ve really got here is another set of credentials to manage. Also, The Browser Company loves to send email - if you do want to try Arc, be sure to unsub from the mailing list. It’s unclear how this is going to work long-term; I think they’re planning to monetise the product via team features, but without interfaces/integrations with things like the MS or Google online infrastructures, I’m not sure who’s going to actually put their hand in their pocket for this.
So, the application itself is nice enough. It has a funky icon. It launches quickly on my 2021 M1 MBP. It has a sidebar (this is very, very similar to Vertical Tabs in Edge, except you don’t get a choice about it) and it organises things into “Spaces” (not dissimilar to Edge’s Tab Groups). The sidebar is the basic foundation for organising your stuff. If you hide the sidebar, there’s no button to get it back. You either press ⌘-S, or choose it off the View menu, or poke your pointer at the left side of the screen and hope you’ve not got an iPad in Continuity mode there so you miss and start activating control centre on the iPad and you get mad – OK, this could just be me.
As an Edge user, with the aforementioned Tab Groups and Vertical Tabs available to me, I’m not really sure what problem Arc is solving here. It’s certainly solving the problem of what to do with all my pixels - the interface has a lot of padding and empty space. There’s a “Little Arc” thing which is basically a small new window. Not sure this needed pulling out into a feature all of its own, but I guess someone might find it useful.
The real issue is that Spaces are just groups of /favourites/bookmarks/folders, and you can hop between these groups. I kinda get what they’re going for here - a better way to organise a lot of browser tabs - but the way it’s introduced (narrator: it was not introduced at all) means most people will simply stay in their first Space, and at that point you’re better off in your existing browser, where you know how to use everything and all your stuff exists and it’s got all your extensions and passwords and extensions that remember your passwords already.
There are some UI wrinkles here, too. When you create a Space, it appears at the top of your sidebar. So you click it. And you’re renaming your space and setting the icon. No, to change Spaces, you need to click the icon (and it’s just an icon) at the bottom of the sidebar. If you don’t set a custom icon, you just end up with several dots representing your Spaces. You can hover over these to get a tooltip with the Space name. Also, if you set your Sidebar to be too narrow, your custom icons turn off and it’s all dots. This is all a bit clunky.
As for browsing? It’s a Chromium browser. It works. It supports Chromium extensions.
I’m sure some people will find Arc to be very useful. It doesn’t gel with the way I work in a browser. I think a larger problem is the requirement for an Arc account providing no obvious benefits. The sync option is to iCloud - so all I’ve really got here is another set of credentials to manage. Also, The Browser Company loves to send email - if you do want to try Arc, be sure to unsub from the mailing list. It’s unclear how this is going to work long-term; I think they’re planning to monetise the product via team features, but without interfaces/integrations with things like the MS or Google online infrastructures, I’m not sure who’s going to actually put their hand in their pocket for this.
