expectedwrong hindsight

The Browser Has Been the Same Since 2004 and Then It Wasn't

Arc showed up and made me feel something I haven't felt about a browser since Firefox told Internet Explorer to go home.

2 min read 221 words #browsers #arc #mac #ux #software
hindsight — evolved

The excitement was justified. The browser was genuinely great. And then The Browser Company killed it in 2025 to build Dia, an AI-native browser, before getting acquired by Atlassian. Arc entered maintenance mode. The most interesting thing in browsers in two decades turned out to be a stepping stone, not a destination.

The web browser is the most used piece of software on earth and nobody has done anything interesting with it since tabs.

Tabs were 2001. We have been coasting on tabs for twenty-one years.

Arc is a Mac-only browser from The Browser Company and it is, without exaggeration, the most interesting thing I've seen in this space in decades — which is either a compliment to Arc or an indictment of the entire industry for two decades of collaborative sleepwalking, and I think it's both.

The layout is wrong in the right way. The UX makes decisions that Chrome and Firefox have been too scared to make because Chrome and Firefox have billions of users who would riot if anything changed, which is the trap that comes with winning. Arc doesn't have that problem yet.

I have an invite link — five uses, probably — at arc.net/gift/9bc37d72. No guarantees it still works by the time you read this. These things evaporate.

Mac only, which will be a dealbreaker for some people and a non-issue for others and I'm not going to litigate that here.

What I will say is this: I've been waiting for someone to take the browser seriously as a design problem rather than a market share problem, and somebody finally did, and it took until 2022.

Better late.