You open tabs, search the web, scroll on your favourite sites, and open even more tabs, losing yourself within them.
Right?
Well, with Arc Browser, from The Browser Company (Available on Mac and iOS), wrong.
This browser, currently invite-only, is a refreshingly unique choice for navigating the internet. I’ve been using it exclusively for the last week now, and I wanted to review what I thought because it’s an impressive piece of software.
Note — I don’t receive any kind of compensation from The Browser Company for this piece, I just think it’s a great browser!
Let’s get started…
First impressions
When I booted up Arc for the first time, I was impressed by the animations and smoothness of the entire onboarding process. I was able to import my history and bookmarks from Vivaldi comfortably and get ready to browse straight away.
This smooth and put-together experience continued as I went on with browsing in the app too.
It seems that Arc has been very thoroughly designed and engineered so that everything feels fresh and snappy.
Features
Command bar
As a self-proclaimed ‘power user’, I like keyboard shortcuts, in every app that I use.
Arc has plenty of them. Most notably, Command + T shows the command bar, which is Arc’s answer to the search bar.
Like a command bar in any other app, this is simply an input that appears in the front of your screen but in this case, you can search anything within the app’s features, like the media on your machine, or your downloads folder, as well as any site on the internet.
If you press search, you’re either taken to the correct part of the app’s interface, or a new tab is created in the sidebar, taking you to the site or search that you’ve made.
This brings us to…
Spaces
Arc’s answer to organisation, these are simply workspaces where you can store different selections of bookmarks and tabs.
You can customise the name and the theme of spaces, and Arc makes it very easy to switch between them, with just a swipe left or right on the sidebar (this is what I mean when I say there are very well-thought-out and polished features that are a pleasure to use).
Arc runs on profiles, like any Chrome-based browser, and you can customise whether you want another space to run on a different profile. I like this because I can simply switch between Medium accounts to work for myself and my client in the same browser, without any hassle.
This is where the magic happens in Arc.
It’s no tab bar, it’s so much more than that.
It’s a place where you can organise your tabs, bookmarks and your favourite sites and apps…
At the top come favourites — they are constantly loaded and are displayed as themed tiles at the top of the sidebar.
Then come the bookmarked tabs in the space. These are the tabs that will hang around (Arc archives or closes tabs that are more than a certain age), and they can be organised in folders, just like any other bookmarks.
Below the bookmarks, the open tabs are shown as they would be in a normal browser, except on the side of the screen rather than along the top.
BEWARE — Arc has an archive feature enabled by default — it will archive all your open tabs after a certain period of time to keep the sidebar clean. However, these archived tabs are available in the archive in the sidebar, which is similar to a history tab, so you can easily recover what you’ve lost.
There are some other features in the sidebar too:
- Media pane — you can access all the media that you’ve recently downloaded or opened on your device, with the ability to drag this across from the sidebar into the tab you’re using. Again, another powerful and extremely useful feature that’s setting Arc apart for me.
- Downloads folder — not dissimilar to the options available in other browsers. Arc does have, however, a little expand-on-hover icon at the bottom left of the sidebar which gives you quick access to these downloads, which is nice.
- Easels and notes — Arc wants to give you an operating system-like experience on the internet, so it has these two features added to the app. Easels are like a canvas you can write, drop links and add screenshots two, and notes is a simple feature that creates a unique-link page that has simple note-taking formatting features.
- Boosts — Arc wants you to make the internet yours, so you can customise the fonts, colours and even the elements of the different websites you visit with Boosts. From removing Instagram stories and Twitter notifications to completely changing the colour and fonts in the site, this is an entertaining feature that has some use in blocking distracting elements of sites.
- Archived tabs — no different to the history tab, this is where you can find all of the tabs that you (or Arc!) close. You can scroll through and filter them so you can find what you’re looking for.
Other features
There are plenty of other features that can be found in Arc, but some that stood out to me were:
- Uses iCloud to sync sidebars across your devices, so you have access to your bookmarked tabs and spaces on your iPhone too.
- There’s a picture-in-picture mode for YouTube and other video platforms, as well as a player that pops out into the sidebar when you’re streaming music from something like Spotify or Soundcloud.
Conclusion
I’m very impressed with the refreshing feel and usability of Arc Browser.
It’s as though The Browser Company has built something that’s more of a labour of love than a tool, with the Boosts, animations and features that make navigating the internet more comfortable.
This will definitely be my go-to browser from now on.
Use this link for access to Arc! Only the first five people to click will get access.