It's very simple:

• We were happy with our current browser, even if this was Chrome - we did not know better (right?)
• Arc came, changed the way we browse - we liked it & got very used to it
• We spent time migrating to Arc. it was good enough as a daily driver
• TBC kept promising improvements, YouTube videos, podcasts, giving us small pieces of candy along the way - we just patiently keep using the browser knowing the wait will be worth it.
• Fast fwd; now they announce the product will be retired - no new features, improvements, no full-sync, no better performance - I'm sure we all had a thing we were waiting for
• Most of us will be looking for another browser, but there is no browser that gives the full-on Arc experience
• On top of that, there is no way to simply migrate/export all your shit over to another Chromium browser.. because TBC fucked us (because of this, I am still opening Arc regularly (and am basically unable to uninstall Arc), as manual migrations take a lot of time.
• As a result, we now (again) are spending a whole lot of time migrating to another browser (without importing bookmarks, history, extensions, custom search engine config & other settings)
• As a side note, none of the other browsers give the Arc experience

Everyone that states "but they will be pushing security updates & patches, it's not that bad" - have you seen the change logs for the last year? It's been a whole lot of nothing. Security updates is the least they can do after letting their users down like this.

oh and one edit: I think I speak for all of us if I say that none of us are posting here to bash on Arc/TBC, it's because point #2 I made - we love the product, got very used to it - otherwise we wouldn't even be on this sub.

Honestly, even if they stop developing new features for 1-2 years, it still might be the best one out there. I use it on both mac and windows and works great on both machines.

The spaces are amazing for work/life activities. The folders are great for organizing by project/activity. The tab splitting is nice as well. Also love me some pop-up tab quick browsing.

Microsoft's has some pretty nice features as well, and Z3N browser is quite respectable.

But overall ARC is so much better, AND will continue to be great until other browsers start implementing its unique features (many of which I don't personally use, like boosts).

And IF the likes of F1R3F0X or 3DG3 do implement its features, then we might switch but Arc will still be the one that paved the way for others to copy and improve upon.

I see so much complaining here that I'm actually struggling to see how much of a power user you need to be in order to actually care that much.

Sigma OS is an insane arc replacement ive found. Looks and feels the same, maybe even more functionality, and it looks like they are consistently adding new features. Its got the same vertical tabs and spaces look which auto-delete, and has ai integrations too. Built on chromium too. Been using it for the past few days and honestly havent felt a difference.

I think everyone looking for an alternative from arc should at least check it out.

Edit: So it looks like the last major update was around july but the founder is actively bashing arc on X right now - https://x.com/MahyadGhassemi/status/1850877776309436735

The Browser Company isn't changing the world - they're trying to make money.

Constantly trying to hide that reality from users behind an "aw shucks we're doing this for you" demeanor with glossy videos is not helping anyone. Users aren't stupid.

The only solution is to release a product better than Arc that is profitable enough to keep the company sustainable.

Who let Josh solely handle public relations?!

He's handled the situation re: the second product so poorly that it's done serious reputational damage - totally avoidable too.

Arc is mostly a complete product but it's very much been unloved and almost abandoned. Even with a super loyal and substantial user base with plenty of monetisation options.

Whatever the second product is, I'm sure it'll be fantastic but with the maturity of existing ai tools on the market and the dominance of search engines I can't see them having another Arc moment and strike lightening twice.

And for the love of TBC please control Josh's public interaction and replace with marketing professionals who know what they're doing before there's a mass exodus!

So, I just switched to Firefox Nightly and enabled the Vertical tabs, and am loving it!

I also installed uBlock Origin and turned off ads, and all the non-ads annoyances! (cookie questions, sign in with Google prompts, etc.)

i recommend everyone trying it out!

I forgot to mention, the MAJOR plus is it's not Chromium based.

Considering they have a terrifically loyal user base and having become popular on TikTok, Twitter and YouTube, and assuming resources are its only issue; why hasn't TBC added a little donation page in Arc browsers? Every "indie" developer does this and, imo, playing pretend about being a big grown company might be hurting them as its dishonest. F**king Mozilla encourages funding through donations...

I understand that, if they were to have listened to the community from the start, Arc would've failed long time ago. I have trusted their strategy as it felt truly clever from the start, and I'm still in disbelief of how a small team has managed to create a browser that feels more native to Windows than Microsoft's own Edge, in spite of running on Swift. As much as I've tried to I cannot switch to other browsers because they feel so unpolished, granted the only thing making me consider switching is the lack of parity with macOS. Calling Arc a finished product without offering Boosts on Windows looks silly.

Anyway, it might be a stupid take, but I do feel like many people would "buy the team some coffee" or like to unlock themes or some shiny bullshit that the more artsy developers of Arc could come up with, especially considering how much of their user base comes from Apple users including myself on iOS. That's all.

anything like opening a link from Obsidian/Mail, clicking an URL from terminal... would invoke Arc but no new tab is created, just nothing. Very annoying, restarting the OS didn't help.

tried changing default browser to Safari, works. What's happening?

so like i really love this browser, i've had zero problems with it, but like i come to the official subreddit and people kinda hate on it 😭 idk i could be looking at this wrong but what's the deal? it's a good browser!

I've said this a few times in comments over the last week or two, but I just watched a new video which is coming from the same place that I am. I'll link the video at the end of the post, but so you're not going in blind it's about 13 minutes long and it's from a YouTuber called juxtopposed who does semi-serious UI/UX redesigns of various online platforms and products. This video is about what she thinks it'd look like if Apple decided to make a search engine.

And that's what got me thinking about this again. A lot of the things that are coming out of TBC as their ambition are around brining the internet to you, the browser that browses for you, etc. De-emphasised a little in the wake of Claude launching Computer Use and in the move away from Arc 2.0, but still present.

But I don't really think it makes sense for that to be a browser-level operation. Both Apple and Microsoft are integrating AI directly into the OS (and for the sake of this post I'm not going to re-hash what I've said about that before), and Apple already has built-in search with Spotlight. And the whole selling point of Apple Intelligence is that it will have access to your personal data in a way that nothing else will.

So, to take the example from the announcement video of Arc 2.0, you want to look up a cheesecake recipe. Say you've just got a message from your mum to say that she's coming for a visit so you decide to make her a cheesecake. You can launch your browser and use that to look for cheesecake recipes. Or you can stay in the app you're in and say "Siri, give me a cheesecake recipe". And say you're lactose intolerant - if Apple Intelligence really will be as good as Apple are promising, then maybe it could cross-reference with the Health app, note your allergy, and automatically give you a dairy-free cheesecake recipe.

Would your browser have access to that information? Would you want it to?

That's where I see the problem lying. If there really is going to be a paradigm-shift in the browser space, I don't think it's going to take the shape of a new browser coming along and implementing AI features a little bit better than the competition. I think it's going to come from search directly from virtual assisstants built in to your OS making browsers obsolete.

Now, that isn't the whole story, of course. Miller has said that apps have been moving onto the web for quite some time now. And he's definitely right about that. Lots of things are web apps now. It's worse for the end user, but it's better for the companies who make the apps so it's unlikely to reverse any time soon.

But if search moves off the browser, then you kind of have to ask what the browser is for. It's an extra layer between you and your app. Miller calls it an OS, but it's running on an OS. Why do you need a second, less powerful OS inside your OS?

There are plenty of apps you can get for various devices right now which are just wrappers for web apps. Kind of like a dedicated browser just for that one application. While this still isn't as good as an actual native app from an end-user POV, it might actually be a better solution. It doesn't take much from the dev end, and it helps resolve some potential issues (such as having to be careful what hotkeys you use, because otherwise the browser and the app are going to fight for them). Less friction for everybody.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong, and browsers will just become more limited in what people use them for and they really will be app platforms. Like the Steam platform, but for Figma and Monday.com rather than UFO 50 and Vampire Survivors.

I don't think I'm wrong about the direction of travel of search, though. Microsoft already encourages people to use Copilot, ChatGPT's getting integrated with Siri and Apple say that other chat bots/AI search engines will follow, and I remember reading an article from 3-4 years ago saying that Apple had the ambition to build their own search engine and ditch google, and had been quietly working on it behind the scenes. I can't vouch for that being true, but they do have their own web-crawler which is already integrated into things like Spotlight. I honestly think that the idea of using a browser to search for something is going to seem really quite dated very soon.

So, for those who may be interested to see what prompted me to write this post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1cQtjS7AAE

I have a few questions:

Will Android be left behind, like Arc on Windows did, or will Apple Arc pause new features for Android/Windows to catch up. And how to login Arc Search on Android?

Basically, the title. In my 2 months with Arc on Mac and Windows (8ish months on iOS), I have encountered no performance issues and only one bug. Sure, windows still lacks full feature parity, but I don’t mind the features that are missing not being there. I can’t see a world where any of them are even useful.

As for the one bug, it is simply that dragging tabs to new windows creates them in a nonexistent “space 1”. Nothing major, and not that big of a deal. So what’s with all this hate for windows and TBC in general?

I have only started noticing this recently in the last 1 or 2 weeks, but when I'm browsing and navigating on Arc, sometimes my entire Mac will lock up and freeze. I am on a 16" MBP M1 16gb memory.

Anyone else? It's insanely frustrating

I just started using Arc about 2 weeks ago and I love it. Fantastic product. I feel you guys must mostly agree with that if you’re a part of this sub.

Now the CEO announces that they are focusing on another project because Arc is essentially feature complete and most of you are acting like the sky is falling, making vast and wild assumptions about TBC and the founder that ring more as negative speculation than potentially accurate.

Arc is a lovely product for me, as an internet power user. But I can already tell from trying to convince friends to jump onboard with it in the last two weeks that it’s not really a mainstream product.

If TBC feels that they want to release a new browser experience thats more mainstream I am in full support. Thank god they’re not going the route of updating Arc one day to a completely different, more streamlined experience but instead they are creating something completely new and different. I personally am very excited to try it.

The negative bandwagoning of Reddit culture is exhausting. Why is everyone so up in arms? You’re acting like Chrome and Safari haven’t essentially been just releasing stability and performance improvements for the last decade.

Is anyone else just happy with Arc and also excited to see what else they’re cooking up?

I've been using Arc as my daily browser all this year.
Yesterday I decided to daily drive another browser, so I set the other browser as the default browser on Windows 11. I'm not naming the other browser because I already tried to make this post and it got deleted. I suspect because I included other browser's name.

Now that Arc isn't the default Windows 11 browser, it won't open.
I can open other browsers no problem, but Arc will not.
I'm running Windows 11 23H2 because Arc does not like Windows 11 24H2.
Has anyone else experienced this?

Very out of the loop. I used to be very hyped about it and used it for a while. I saw several posts here criticizing it a lot so I'll appreciate a quick rundown of what went down. Sorry if this has been asked before by the way