As someone who has used Arc for just over a year now, I have a love/hate relationship with it.
There are some features like the ability to "peek" into a webpage or Little Arc which is really handy for SSO popups without changing full focus to the browser that makes other browsers feel like a step down.
That said, and maybe this will change post-1.0, there were a lot of basic bugs that popped up over time like tabs disappearing from the sidebar, tabs "syncing" into the void because the browser blindly copied state from another browser, tabs that can't be closed and so on.
Generally these are fixed and don't happen all at once but when they do, it rubs up against the new features being touted to make you feel insane. "Boosts are great but I just want the browser to stop interfering so I can do some work"
Anyway, it's a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes. I love it and anything else is a downgrade but it also keeps hurting me but nowhere near enough to outweigh the benefits.
As far as support goes, it feels bit like they're a victim of success. Almost every ticket used to get a response but now I rarely hear anything which makes the canned "We value your feedback" feel hollow. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Support has changed. It's just a somewhat unavoidable outcome when you start as part of a niche and the userbase rapidly grows, making replying to everything untenable.
In all, I'm glad there is a new entrant. Would a new engine be nice? Sure but differentiating a browser and building a full rendering engine at the same time is a bit of a tall order off the bat.
Perhaps if they had a cash generating machine already like Google did. It'll be interesting to see if that changes in future (I assume it won't be who knows) and they're doing a lot of interesting work porting Swift to Windows (their strategy for porting Arc)
I'm still a daily user since things have been solid for the last little while but I do wonder how things might degrade (enshittify) given a future need to return VC investment. You can learn a bit about their monetisation thinking here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eVda3zFLlhc
Particularly the videofile series which talks a lot about their internal workings, metrics and so on. There are times that I've had bad bugs or a new feature was ill received and then the next videofile confirms they've seen that reaction in bulk too
There are some features like the ability to "peek" into a webpage or Little Arc which is really handy for SSO popups without changing full focus to the browser that makes other browsers feel like a step down.
That said, and maybe this will change post-1.0, there were a lot of basic bugs that popped up over time like tabs disappearing from the sidebar, tabs "syncing" into the void because the browser blindly copied state from another browser, tabs that can't be closed and so on.
Generally these are fixed and don't happen all at once but when they do, it rubs up against the new features being touted to make you feel insane. "Boosts are great but I just want the browser to stop interfering so I can do some work"
Anyway, it's a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes. I love it and anything else is a downgrade but it also keeps hurting me but nowhere near enough to outweigh the benefits.
As far as support goes, it feels bit like they're a victim of success. Almost every ticket used to get a response but now I rarely hear anything which makes the canned "We value your feedback" feel hollow. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Support has changed. It's just a somewhat unavoidable outcome when you start as part of a niche and the userbase rapidly grows, making replying to everything untenable.
In all, I'm glad there is a new entrant. Would a new engine be nice? Sure but differentiating a browser and building a full rendering engine at the same time is a bit of a tall order off the bat.
Perhaps if they had a cash generating machine already like Google did. It'll be interesting to see if that changes in future (I assume it won't be who knows) and they're doing a lot of interesting work porting Swift to Windows (their strategy for porting Arc)
I'm still a daily user since things have been solid for the last little while but I do wonder how things might degrade (enshittify) given a future need to return VC investment. You can learn a bit about their monetisation thinking here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eVda3zFLlhc
Lastly, I'll plug their YouTube channel which is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBrowserCompany
Particularly the videofile series which talks a lot about their internal workings, metrics and so on. There are times that I've had bad bugs or a new feature was ill received and then the next videofile confirms they've seen that reaction in bulk too