On Arc Browser Becoming Boring

Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, on youtube.com:

Got two things to share with you today: Arc is not going anywhere. The product you love is staying put, and we’re building a brand new product. To be honest, we’re not even sure it’s a web browser.

This created some drama within the Arc users community. The following two comments on the video sums it well:

@gurupanguji on a comment:

Have a feeling this is the goodbye message for the arc browser. Whenever a company says they are building a diff product for a larger audience against a product for a small set of users that’s free, one just needs to do the math.

@joshmiller973 (Arc’s CEO) reply:

Arc isn’t going anywhere. The number of people using Arc every day has grown ~4x this year. It’d be silly for us not to continue making it more stable, secure and performant. Our team poured their hearts into Arc. We’re just not going to keep cramming new features into it to try to make it something it’s not meant to be. I’ve personally been burned by software that becomes a Frankenstein product. I know future actions will speak louder than words but this is about building a second browser for the people that Arc doesn’t resonate with. There’s a reason we called it The Browser Company (not Arc). We’re inspired by Apple to have different product lines for different types of people and use cases.

Amazingly, a few weeks back Chris Messina nailed it on his newsletter article:

Now, I have no idea if this is an idea that Arc will carry forward in v2.0, but considering the relative lack of enthusiasm and stalled development of Easels and Boosts, and the commoditization of Arc Max features (see Sparkle and Fabric) I’m guessing that Arc is going to pivot hard towards agentive-style workflows that result in tasks being completed by and in the browser — and that are, to the right customers, worth paying for.

The whole post is worth a read. But the gist of Chris Messina article and Josh Miller’s announcement is that any app that wishes to provide a solution for 1 Billion users — should not hide behind a browser. It needs to be a floating orb on your desktop, providing answers, writing, transforming and combining whatever information/data it has access to.

At some point in the future, the orb will do its magic, not only within the constrains of your laptop desktop, or mobile home-screen. But with the context of what you’re actually seeing — the promised augmented reality paradigm.

Still, I’m happy that Arc will become boring and survive — at least for a while. It’s features are likely become standard UX language like Opera’s tabs, and level’s up the browser category for everyone.