The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces (Ep. 554)
Ben and Cassidy sit down with The Browser Company to talk about reimagining the web browser—and the way we use the internet. Plus: The best username out there (don’t @ us).
Episode notes:
Today’s guests from The Browser Company are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos.
The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.”
For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.
Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.
Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.
Tags: arc, the stack overflow podcast, web browser
13 Comments
Hmm, I was interested and decided to check out their site. Absolutely useless. Zero screeenshots and covered with flashy animations. If this post itself hadn’t had the links to the verge and inverse articles I would’ve moved on without a care.
Having dug through to find what it looks like though, it does sound like a nice browser!
This “new” browser brings to mind a mild question: WTHF? And another: Why?
You can check out their browser on YouTube. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do with Firefox. It just has some unusual defaults.
I watched the intro video to their browser. It looks like investor bait: make it look fancy, rearrange UI elements, call it innovation, stuff it with features that don’t belong in a browser, and build up hype. Then wait for rich people with FOMO to bite.
Just no. A browser without tabs is stupid.
We had it before. It was called IE3.
Yeah, full of new ideas about how we should interact with the web, led and fed by AI and sponsors.
Of course without the data that they mine directly from us, the “ideas” will look pretty relevant and insightful, nothing can beat the helpfulness of it.
What can go wrong, right?
The popular software industry behaves like fashion industry. Just pushing colors, bevels and icons back and forth.
Wait, am I not the world’s worst coder?
I’m torn because, as a web developer, I must build for the masses, yet for my own workflow’s sake, feel like this could help. But to have multiple applications that do the same thing – being required to use one, I might have to pass. I’m on the waitlist so at least I can evaluate the merit and value of what they are attempting to accomplish.
I used Arc for about a month, then I switched back to Safari. Arc has some neat features, but none of them actually make me more productive, in fact I felt less productive using Arc versus Safari, mostly due to getting distracted messing with Arc’s features and because of the lack of Apple Keychain integration.
Overall, I don’t see where you defined what you meant by “only spaces, no tabs”
I reviewed the transcript, rather than listen to the podcast. I tried to find the answer to what you meant by “only spaces, not tabs”
By reading, I could easily skip stuff that that I don’t apply to the topic listed in the title, like how or why you got into computing.
Anybody show me, what’s the thing that is better in this browser than in the others? Aren’t people happy with the existing browsers? If not, why should they be happy with this one?