Last year, a hot new web browser entered the villa tech world with big dreams of forever changing how we use the Internet; meet Arc by The Browser Company. Coming off of our first week of school, we wanted to reflect on Arc’s “firsts” and take a look at where they are going next.
Put simply, Arc is another web browser, just like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox; they just do things a little differently. Currently, only their V1 is available to use, which helps you organize your internet browsing. The most noticeable change is that your tabs live on the left side of the screen, rather than up top. From there, you can organize your tabs into Spaces. Spaces create distinct browsing areas for you to work from, whether that's for different projects, classes, or your personal and school accounts.
The Browser Company’s CEO and co-founder Josh Miller is where the Arc story begins. He started in tech as the Director of Product of the Obama Administration (”That’s a job?!” Yes! Basically he PM’d everything that Obama put out on the Internet). From there, he moved into a role as an investor for a startup incubator right when Notion was gaining popularity. He strongly believed it was “just hipster Google Docs” until the fourth or fifth time he tried the product. This is where inspiration struck. Miller looked at how Notion was able to flip the way we write documents on its axis and wanted to find another space where he could do the same thing.
Enter: the web browser. Miller was surrounded by the companies who were creating the next generation of web apps but chose to zoom out and change the way we access these web apps in the first place. The web browser hasn’t been redesigned since its creation and has thus become pretty antiquated. Miller’s core idea was to change how we browse so that it better matches the multifaceted way we use the Internet today, and his role at a startup incubator gave him the right resources to get going.
Once the Arc team believed they had a product ready to test, they ran into the same core problem that all new and innovative products do: how do you teach users this change in behavior and convince them it is significantly better? Arc chose a pretty unique approach: hand onboarding. This is exactly what it sounds like, getting on a call with every new user and teaching them how to use Arc.
This technique was amazingly retentive, but couldn’t scale. Arc wanted to grow to millions of daily active users and had to let go of hand onboarding in order to do that. They prioritized creating a clean and exciting onboarding experience, where every user got a personalized member card and made the jump to self-serve onboarding.
Arc V2 is coming soon with the vision of creating “a browser that browses for you.” Currently, web browsers serve solely as the middleman between you and the web; it is purely a vehicle for you to find the information you need. Arc intends to leverage AI to do the “browsing” part for you and get you to the information you need quicker. Essentially, Arc will create a new search engine that goes out and reads all the relevant links for you and then gives you a summary. For example, if you wanted to do research on the Apple Vision Pro, instead of opening 10 articles about it, Arc Search finds that information for you and presents it cleanly and concisely.
It is quite clear that Arc has big ambitions to transform the Internet. These are exciting changes, especially to the structures that have been around as long as the Internet has. But we have yet to see a ton of follow-through from Arc and their future vision seems quite shaky.
Their V1 claims to revolutionize the way we browse with an innovative organization system. Yes, their system of Spaces is a great way to stay organized (I use it too!), but Arc runs on Chromium, so it can only build on existing Chrome capabilities. This seriously limits their ability to grow as a product, especially given that they want to revolutionize the way we use the Internet.
Arc’s vision for the future is to use AI to do the browsing for the user. The point of an Internet browser and search engine is to connect the user to the web, just like the point of Spotify is to connect you to music. Arc Search goes out into the web and reports back to you, which sounds a lot like if Spotify went and listened to an album and simply told you about it. My question for Arc is what user problem is being solved here?