Arc is Great, But
Arc is, in one word, delightful. The entire experience of installing, setting up and using the browser is filled to the brim with excitement. You can feel it pouring out of its team onto every crevice of the app. It’s been my default browser for well over a year at this point.
And yet.
There’s at least three things that annoy me about Arc. Let’s call them the bad, the ugly and the monster.
The Bad
Arc doesn’t do bookmarklets. Maybe because it doesn’t really do bookmarks? not in the traditional sense, at least. But whereas the alternative feels at least as good, if not better, for bookmarks (tabs can be as ephemeral or as permanent as you’d like, plus you can set up folders, the lack of proper bookmarklet support is baffling.
I’ve resorted to using an extension called Powerlet, which is just fine, but doesn’t synchronise across profiles or devices, thus breaking the portability of the browser.
The Ugly
Because Arc doesn’t do bookmarks, it also means there’s no native way to export your Arc Pinned Tabs™️. This is just totally baffling. Platform lock-in in its purest sense. Some folks out there have gone through the trouble of creating the proper tools for exporting your data:
- https://github.com/ivnvxd/arc-export
- https://github.com/Physton/arc-bookmarks
As I’m typing this, I’m looking into Safari and looks a lot more like Arc than I remember. Tabs at the side, separate profiles. Bookmarklet support and excellent syncing between mobile and desktop. I might just try switching back.
The Monster
Arc is going all-in on A.I., with features that allow users to summarise the content of pages and even a “Browse for Me” feature that acts like a souped-up search that spits out a full page instead of a list of search results.
They sum it up thus (source):
Here is our vision. It’s really simple. You tell Arc what to do, and Arc will go and do it for you
There are a lot of companies right now trying to insert A.I. between yourself and your computer and/or the internet (see: Rabbit R1, Reflect, and so on.
I’m hesitant about these kinds of features, to say the least.