A little over a week ago, I fully moved over from using Chrome to Arc! 🌐

The experience has been very eye-opening in a variety of ways from seeing how much I procrastinate while on the internet, realizing how badly the internet browser market needs innovation, and finally seeing how we all need to allow and embrace changes even to the apps and solutions we use everyday…

This is a Thought Jumble of my thoughts, feelings, and ramblings about Arc during the 1st week!

Let’s go! 🚀

So first off what is Arc?

Arc is an internet browser based on Chromium — meaning that fundamentally it works the same as any other Chromium-based browser. All the Chrome-based extensions work just fine and browsing feels just as if not more smooth than Chrome does!

Okay… then what’s different?

Loads! 😎

It all starts with the sidebar! In Arc, there is no URL search bar at the top of the window! 🙈 There isn’t even a bookmarks bar, or anything up top actually! 🤯

You navigate by using a bar on the left-hand side which houses all your tabs, “bookmarks” (we will dive into those in a second 👀), and customizations!

Now trust me at first this does take some getting used to and it is 100% a bit awkward to use in the beginning, but all that is well worth it for the amount of benefits it gives!

One of those benefits is…

Spaces! 🗂️

I have a problem… I am a tab hoarder! 😔✊

On a slow day, I have 5 Chrome tab groups open each with at least 15 tabs. Plus even more random websites open on top of that.

…I DEFINITELY have a problem… 😂

This has been affecting my productivity to a point where I would go to look something up, let's say for a new Notion template I am working on or a new project I was assigned at work, and I would end up getting sidetracked down a rabbit hole of random recommended videos and posts for an hour and it would on top of all that clog up my session with loads of random tabs too!

Spaces perfectly fix that problem!

Think of a space in Arc as a browser window. It’s like a completely new instance of the browser that you can switch to at any point by just 2 finger-swiping on the sidebar!

I’ve made spaces for work, school, and personal use!

You can open any new tab in any space so I can be working in my “Work” space and see something I want to look into tonight that is cooking-related and open that in the personal space so I don’t get distracted in the moment! 💪

This is perfect if you want to stick to separating capture from organizing and expressing, like Building a Second Brain states!

Now instead of getting bogged down by hours of random content, we didn’t plan on consuming, we have it saved and placed out of our minds so we can get back to work! 😎

Plus an added benefit is that these spaces are truly separate with completely customizable colors, icons, names, and pinned tabs too!

Pinned Tabs! 📌

In Arc, there are no bookmarks! 🤯

Now I know what you’re thinking… but hear me out…

I love the way The Browser Company designed this, and it took me a while to appreciate it, but now I could never go back!

On the sidebar, there is a faint grey line. Any tabs under this grey line are “archived” and closed after a set time you choose. This limits tab hoarding and ensures that any tabs you have open are open for a reason!

Any tabs above this line are pinned.

What’s a pinned tab?

Pinned tabs are just like normal open tabs, but they are saved and will never go away unless you close and unpin them.

Now let’s say you pin Twitter, and open the pinned tab. It doesn’t open a new tab like a traditional bookmark would.

Twitter opens in the pinned tab itself!

Now let’s say you stay on Twitter for a bit… You open loads of different profiles, tweets, new pages, and links and now you want to get back to your original page. Your “bookmark” in a sense.

No need to close anything or redirect yourself back or even close out any new tabs you may have opened. You just hit the little page icon next to the tab and it takes you back to your original pinned tab with the correct name too! 🤩

This solves SO many issues I have with bookmarks and keeping my browsing experience organized.

I used to keep Gmail, Twitter, and YNAB all open on the left-hand side of my browser window because they are always the most relevant to what I am working on, but they end up changing into some other website just by normal use or I run the risk of hitting the “open in new tab” option way too many times!

Also, any pinned tabs are specific to that space you are in so you can truly keep your life areas separate… but for those websites we need all day every day we can also “favorite” them across all our spaces too!

With these two big pillars of Arc combined you can stay organized with all areas of your life and with what you decide to browse on the internet!

Booooooosts! 🎨

The last two reasons why I love Arc have been technical.. this is fancier! 🎩

Remember when you were a kid and you would inspect elements on your school computer to prank your teachers? Maybe you would change some words around on your screen and you would think you were so cool for it?

No? Only me…? 😂 (I was and still am a MASSIVE nerd! 🤓)

Imagine this but properly integrated into your browser in a really helpful way!

Instead of using inspect element for silly things like that Arc allows you to “Zap” away useless parts of websites that could ruin your browsing experience!

On top of that, you can also change the page’s text colors, fonts, and sizes, and you can even get super in-depth adding your own custom CSS and JS scripts too to customize the sites you visit!

These changes are called boosts!

As of right now, I have multiple boosts across loads of websites just adding and tweaking things here and there that have always bugged me! The fact that I can view these sites how I want is huge!

The Browser Company even made a site dedicated to sharing your boosts with others! There are some cool ones available so if you do try out Arc I’d highly recommend looking into it!

Key Points! 😌

These were just my top 3 features that have been the most game-changing for me in the 1st week of use, but there are others! From how I can access my downloads and files directly within my sessions to having a mini-whiteboard available at any time by using easels!

Now Arc isn’t all good vibes.

There have been some bugs I have experienced such as not being able to move backward a page using trackpad gestures or a boost crashing my session altogether, but I expect these at this stage, and like any young product it will have its issues in the beginning, and with how fast The Browser Company is innovating, I am perfectly fine with that!

Arc is a super cool browser with so much potential! And honestly, I think that is where this product affects me the most.

Browsers have not changed much for the end user in such a long time. Innovation is not seen very often in this category and to see a young startup take on the challenge and do so with such style too is awesome and I love supporting such a company!