Arc and the Browser Company are a great example of the zirp phenomenon. If you look at the offices and the rightly called out hubris of the company which makes a Chrome skin, you would think they are at least Stripe scale.

Right now the competition is Chrome adding features and everyone else taking them away.

Nobody else adds anything except privacy enhancements, so for a typical non privacy focused user the rest are either not that interesting or too small and niche to seem trustworthy.

I don't really want more browsers, what I'd really like to see is Chrome apps and extensions on Mobile, with more power.

With fine grained permissions of course, but still with enough permissions to change the UI, write sandboxed user visible files, and talk to other stuff on the LAN.

It seems like a hard needle to thread: mainstream enough that billions of users will use it with a set of features unique enough that Chrome and Edge won’t just copy.

Tabs was such an obviously good idea all the browsers copied it in short order. Anything arc builds on top of chromium seems destined for the same fate once millions are using it.

If you want to change behavior you have to start with a clear mainstream user need, not building features for power users and hoping they trickle down.

It's hard to square seeing the magnitudes of capability coming from genAI & AR and thinking the web UX is done because someone's idea of browser tab layout is boring

How we use the web today, with the Chrome engine and skins as the user agent, seems like the last decade's local optimum. The community is increasingly iterating to the next leap, and I don't think the winning companies will be perplexity.ai, Anthropic 's compute API, meta's Ray-Bans, or some browser ChatGPT extension startup. There is a lot of room for new winners.

I do agree with ZIRP comments saying this is NOT a matter like Zoom doing everything 10% better to be enough: browser teams need to be thinking 10X+ better on broad use. Brave tapped into the privacy & ads psyche, which is a leap for a large niche, but still not enough compared to some sort of more ambitious Jarvis etc rethink.

No one can know what the winning form factors will be without trying and finding out, so IMO, the next few years are a lot more interesting wrt UX then the last 10+!

For those of us confused that’s Arc the browser, not Arc the framework powering HN: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(web_browser)

Vertical tabs dont work because the width of a screen is bigger than height.

The remarks about calculators made me remember the Google's horrible calculator app in Android.

The fonts and colors on that website are really nice. Just thought I'd add that.