There’s a new web browser in town – Arc. Created by The Browser Company, Arc is being designed to help users customize their own web experiences. The company’s mission is to strip out the noise and clutter of the internet to help keep users focused, organized and in control. The Browser Company wants to use Arc to set users up for success and equip them with the tools for how we use the internet today and to shape the internet of the future.
“We love the internet, but it can be overwhelming,” says The Browser Company on their home page. “What if a browser could help us make sense of it all?”
$17M in funding
The company’s team is made up of an experienced group of founders, engineers and other experts who have left companies like Instagram, Tesla, Medium and Google Chrome. Additionally, they have secured over $17 million in funding from industry leaders from Instagram, Stripe, Zoom, Figma, Twitter and more. In a newsletter from 2020, the company said that they built five different browsers to test different hypotheses, and their team started with 16 people across six different counties.
“When we think about browsing the internet, we often ignore the browser itself. Instead, we think about all the things we do online—the articles we read, the emails we send, the shows we watch. The software that enables it all, the browser, is so ubiquitous that it’s ignored,” says The Browser Company’s website.
A browser to empower us
The company also says that, while the internet has evolved, the browsers we use haven’t changed that much.
“That’s why we’re building a new browser—we believe it could do so much more to empower us. We’re imagining a browser that can think as quickly as we do, take work off of our plates, and pull our creativity forward. A browser equipped for the way we use the internet in 2022, and foundational for how we hope to use it in the future,” the company says.
Unlike popular browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, Arc is meant to be unique to each user. Like a subscription box service, there is an “unboxing experience” that allows users to go through a tutorial that feels like the beginning of a video game. The design team said that color can feel very personal, and the design team wants users to feel like they can relax and feel comfortable with their browser.
An additional design aspect includes a lit frame around the browser to help draw the eye to the space, according to Input Magazine. Tabs appear to users in a vertical format, rather than the traditional horizontal version, and will stay that way across all windows unless left alone for 12 hours. Users are also able to pin their browser tabs.
On top of that, the browser has more built-in memory than other browsers do. The browser doesn’t close all of a user’s tabs as soon as they close the window.
“Arc has more memory than so many other browsers. You’re not surfing millions of URLs every day, you’re usually looking at a consistent set of tabs. Arc remembers what you’re doing and shows up for you in that sense,” Dustin Senos of Arc told Input Magazine.
Currently, there is no known launch date, but interested parties are able to sign up via The Browser Company’s waitlist.
Insider Take
Yes, please! Where do we sign up? Today’s browsers can be difficult to navigate. They also need regular updating with security patches, and some applications need browser extensions to play nicely with other apps. We don’t hate browsers, and we certainly need them, but it would be refreshing to try something new and less complicated to better organize our digital lives. [And, yes, we did sign up to be on the waitlist.]
