My thoughts on the beta version of the Arc Browser for Windows
Following are some features from the browser which I found noteworthy. Honestly, I’m yet to come across any solid cons, since the company behind this browser is very transparent about the development process, and though it doesn’t do all things correctly, it doesn’t go wrong with them.
👀 User Interface
The user interface feels clean, refined and beautiful. It’s not different enough to seem like a revolution, but it is different enough to turn a few heads. It feels exceptionally clean, cleaner than all other browsers out there. The address bar and title bar are merged, and tab navigation is vertical. The acrylic translucent blur looks in sync with the Fluent UI on Windows. With the sidebar collapsed, we are left with the cleanest view in any Windows browser. There’s a few more icons incoming with upcoming feature updates, but the clean look is here to stay.
🏘️ Spaces
Spaces are like virtual desktops inside your browser that you can switch between. For example, you could have one space for work, one for recreation and one for something else. You can seamlessly switch between them, keeping your tabs organized. You can also have a different color theme for every space. You can pin tabs in each space, and also create folders in each space. It’s nothing unique, since we’ve had tab groups for tab organization for ages now, but it’s well integrated and aesthetically pleasing. You can switch between them by swiping on your touchpad, pretty convenient for laptop users.
📂 Tab Archiving
Every recently closed tab goes to the archive, and all unpinned tabs in a space are archived after 12 hours. This is aimed at automatically clearing the clutter since you can just drag the tabs you need into the pinned section and they’ll stay there. At first I really thought this was going to be a pointless feature for me, but it’s useful for the occasional research sprees I get into, ending up with a hundred tabs.
🔖 Favorite Tabs
You can favorite tabs and they’ll stay at the top of the list, prominently, and show up on every space you go.
Features 2, 3 & 4 are not mind blowing, but well executed. You can easily pin or favorite tabs or vice versa by just dragging tabs in and out of these sections, which is VERY seamless, sort of like adding bookmarks.
🕵️ Peeking web results
You can ‘peek’ into links from pinned tabs. I found this especially useful in Google searches. Now instead of opening one result, going back, opening another one, or cluttering your tabs by opening all results in new tabs, you can just preview, close, preview, close in a popup all while your search page stays alive. You can also choose to add the result to a split screen for comparing it with another one. I wish this had been introduced way earlier in all browsers, feels way more natural than having to navigate back and forth through multiple search results.
📘 Other features
You do get split screen, as I mentioned above. You can split your screen space between upto 4 websites at the same time, noice. Having multiple tabs open in split view also groups them up in the tabs list, which is neat. You can also favorite or pin these groups. You can then choose to perform actions on them or ungroup them.
Since it’s based on Chromium, it comes with other chromium features out of the box, extensions, site translation by Google, PiP, even the same settings and flags. You cannot open PDFs easily yet, though you can always open them by entering the file Uri in the address bar, and the PDF viewing experience is the same as any other Chromium based browser as of now.
🚀 Performance
Performance-wise, it’s average. It’s faster than Vivaldi, Opera & Edge, scoring 980.63 on the benchmarking test, but there’s much faster browsers out there. (Consider reading this article for reference)
It lacks in the graphic rendering and CSS capability departments, while it did pretty good at canvas.js & svg tests as well as at page load & responsiveness. I was expecting worse, since this browser wasn’t originally made for Windows, but I guess there’s little to go wrong with since they’re using Chromium at the end of the day. It’ll be interesting to see how the performance is affected when other features like notes, boost, or max are added in the future. According to their roadmap they are yet to release more performance updates, let’s see how it does after those are dropped.
🤔 Should you use the beta version?
Yes, if you don’t mind a occasional crashes and bugs. It has crashed on me just a couple of times over the course of my 10 days using it constantly. But there’s no point in switching to it except for aesthetic pleasure since many core features are yet to be shipped on Windows while they have already been released for MacOS.
I assume it will take them another 3–4 months at least to bring all those core features to the Windows version, looking at their roadmap. Until then, it is just another browser, with a few tricks up its sleeve.
One thing I would like to put forth is the quality of the app itself, right from the installer to the setup, it feels refined. I hope The Browser Company does their concept justice and puts forth a good finished product. I also hope they don’t paywall unique core features, the browsing scene needs novelty right now and it’d be a shame to keep it hidden behind money.
Do share your thoughts in the comments, see you soon!
