Arc Review

My Experience using Arc

This is feedback I wrote for The Browser Company, the folks who build Arc:

Full disclosure: after a 3 day test drive with Arc, I had to stop using it. Fundamentally my issue is the central design philosophy of Arc:

• Old paradigm: a bunch of apps (including browser) mediated by the OS and other apps (i.e. app switcher, raycast, etc.)
• Arc paradigm: let 80% (or some high amount) of your workflow live in the browser and use Arc to mediate

The issue: I think the OS is fundamentally a better mediator than arc

There's also some behavior that has to be unlearned to use Arc, and Arc doesn't make it particularly easy. For instance, bookmarks: I (and many others) import bookmarks when we onboard. The way I (and again, many others I know) use bookmarks is that we have folders of bookmarks that are related and we use often (in fact, I use an extension to search them sometimes).

When Arc imports the bookmarks, anytime I navigate to a page I have bookmarked, it uses the pinned page version (or whatever its called, above the fold on the sidebar) - at the very least, a nudge on how to make bookmarks useful in Arc would be awesome.

My last gripe is the entire notion of the side bar (minus the pinned apps at the top, that I think is great). I can just use the onetab browser extension to do almost the exact same thing without needing to rethink how I interact with a browser. My challenge is: what does the side bar let me do that onetab doesn't?

Ok real last gripe this time: system resource use. The chromium browswers are all bad at this, but I think Arc might be even worse than chrome 😬.

Hopefully this is useful if you are someone who builds arc, or is considering using it. It's clear the Arc team is trying to make a really meaningful product, and I would love for it to have worked for me, but it really didn't. Hopefully some of this stuff is useful!