I’m switching back to Arc Browser (for now)

I adopted Arc Browser as soon as I could get my hands on an invite. It was definitely weird at first, but it had what I considered the holy grail of features in a web browser: separate profiles with their own spaces all in the same window. I cannot stress how helpful that has been for my workflow and it’s something I was searching for long before I started using Arc.

Why I need a non-traditional browser

I imagine that I have some kind of neurodivergence. I haven’t formally explored it and I don’t really know enough to put a label on it. Context switching is very difficult for me and I get distracted so easily, which isn’t helpful when my mind is constantly drawing connections between seemingly disparate things. I can become very obsessive on topics and often lose track of time when I get lost diving into details and making a terrible mess of my workspace making it unapproachable for myself if I return to it.

Anyway, I should probably talk to a mental health specialist about all of that, the point I’m trying to make is that Arc is shaped in a way that has been tremendously helpful for my ability to work and focus. Being able to eliminate distractions, separate extremely focused contexts, switch between contexts in a non-overwhelming way, tame my tab hoarding tendencies or at least create meaningful structures for those tabs, all have been incredible for me.

Before Arc, I was jumping between browsers because I couldn’t use Firefox, my previous daily driver, for work since the proprietary SSO extension required for that job didn’t support it — IYKYK. What I loved about Firefox was its container tabs. They allowed me to have separate isolated sessions in the same window. They weren’t perfect as all of those container tabs were still mixed together in the tab list, so I had joked that I wanted Firefox’s container tabs and Chrome’s tab groups to have a baby.

Arc was even better than that.

My forever browser?

In Arc, there are profiles which is very similar to profiles in other Chromium browsers: they have their own session and extensions. A major difference is that in Arc profiles all live in the same window.

A core feature of Arc is spaces which are effectively separate tab lists (almost like tab groups) which are visually isolated from each other. Multiple spaces can use the same profile and when they do, they can share some favourites which are like a super pinned tab. Within spaces, regular pinned tabs can be organized and renamed like bookmarks inside folders. Using the same hotkey to close a tab on a pinned tab will reset it to its initial URL which is helpful when I make a mess of my pins.

A very important feature for a browser like this is being able to route incoming URLs into the correct space. For this, Arc has a feature called “Air Traffic Control” which allows you to set up those routing rules. I found it works exceptionally well.

A more controversial feature that I’ve come to really love is the default to clear tabs after a certain period of time. The default of 24 hours might be too short for some, but that’s why it’s configurable. Left unchecked, I am a major tab hoarder. Sometimes I’d have hundreds of tabs hoarded on my phone, but I’ve since taken advantage of a feature like this in Safari. Since Arc makes it pretty easy to meaningfully organize tabs, I’d treat the regular tabs like an inbox and the pinned tabs would become longer-term storage.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are features of Arc that I really do not like — their quote feature which I think is a recipe for widespread link rot and the Arc Max AI bullshit — but Arc worked overwhelming well for me and I used it almost exclusively for two years.

Getting off the Arc

I made plans to stop using Arc, when I realized the team was more interested in AI and “disrupting” traditional web search than iterating on the user experience of the browser. Sadly, that probably hasn’t changed and I’ll address that later.

But it took months to stop using Arc because I had really leaned into many features like folders and renaming tabs. Whenever I started a new project at work, I’d scaffold out a new folder with renamed tabs for each environment of the site I was working on, sometimes even tabs for my own PRs or the ones I was reviewing. I’d collect important links which I’d give more relevant names.

First stop on the Safari

Initially, I jumped to Safari and made use of its profile feature and tab groups. Tab groups were the closest thing I could get to renaming tabs, so sometimes I’d just have a single tab in a group or I’d get creative with how I organized groups. Safari’s Reading List feature replaced how I sometimes used pinned tabs in Arc — almost in a better way, since I use the Reading List on my iPhone a fair bit either to queue up articles to listen to while I wash dishes or to read if I’m ever offline. Ultimately, I still struggled with funnelling tabs into the correct contexts, keeping those contexts focused and in tact, and dealing with some frustrating bugs in Web Inspector.

I evaluated a number of other browsers, like Vivaldi and Orion, and though they had many features that I liked, I just couldn’t find one that worked with how I now worked.

Once my previous job ended, I sought to make the return to Firefox or a Firefox-based browser. I tried a few, even Firefox Nightly which has an experimental vertical tabs features, but I ultimately landed on Zen browser for a few months.

Zen: the closest browser to Arc

Zen was the closest to Arc that I’ve found. Zen not only has container tabs since it’s Firefox based, it has its own Space-like feature called Workspaces which effectively works the same. You can even set a default container tab to use for a space. Container tabs already do have a routing feature to open matching URLs in the correct container, so it was very close to Arc’s “Air Traffic Control.”

Now while Zen is really shaping up to be effectively an Arc-clone in Firefox, I found it to be too unstable and slow for my day-to-day work. Sometimes an update would completely break my workspaces. There were times when I’d need to research a topic and I just knew that I could do it more effectively in Arc itself.

Firefox’s Web Developer Tools also has a terrible bug where constructed stylesheets sometimes won’t display at all in the style panel which would require a full reload and re-opening of the dev tools panel. It was oddly reminiscent of the bug I was dealing with in Safari’s Web Inspector which required the same solution.

Despite this, I am optimistic for Zen browser. I truly loved being back in a Firefox-based browser. I also loved having my vertical tabs on the right side instead of the left — am I the only person in the world that’s bothered when you toggle a left sidebar and my left-to-right content shifts substantially? I digress.

Once I realized that Zen could not sustain my day to day work, I knew I had to go back to what I knew worked: Arc.

There and back again

So, I am somewhat reluctantly back using Arc and it’s made a noticeable difference already. I’m disheartened that the company is still obsessed with AI. I have mixed feelings about them deciding to not work on another major version of Arc: they are leaving Arc alone to channel that AI-fixation elsewhere, but at the same time, despite what they said, I hope this isn’t Arc’s death-knell.

I thought Arc could be my forever browser, but I’m really not sure that’s a thing. I expect that I’ll adventure elsewhere at some point. If I could steal an ounce of the Browser Company team’s AI-consumed attention for Arc to ask one selfish thing:

Can I please but my sidebar on the right-hand side? That would truly make Arc complete to me.