Getting Dumped By My Web Browser
I still remember the first time I ever heard of Arc Browser. It really was love at first sight.
Arc is (was?) a web browser created by a startup called The Browser Company, with a really novel and compelling hypothesis about what a browser should be in the 2020s. The basic gist of it was that the basic web browser was designed twenty years ago as merely a way to retrieve and display HTML from servers. But as the web became more and more complicated and dynamic, browsers never really evolved to keep up.
Arc was a radical redesign, meant to be an operating system for the internet. Tabs either acted like permanent app launchers, or if they weren’t important, they were cleared out every 24 hours. Things you’d otherwise need a new window for—split screen, multi-account management—could all be done in seamless, cleaner ways. You could even open a link in a mini-window over your previous tab you could click out of to close (like the new WaterlooWorks if it worked correctly).
I heard about it from an article on The Verge from November 2022[1], which hit me like a revelation. I had, truth be told, never thought much about the browser I spent almost all of my computer time on. I had done the thing I always try to avoid and internalized the problems with the systems I interact with. If it doesn’t work, it’s probably your fault. Just figure it out. Arc was a promise that someone out there was seriously thinking about pushing the design of this critical piece of technology forwards.
The only problem was that the browser was exclusive to MacOS, with a Windows version promised nebulously at some point in the future. Like any good love story, this plotline contains plenty of yearning.
I signed up for the Windows waitlist, but always kept my eye on Arc. The more I saw Arc evolve, the more frustrating and clunky Chrome felt. Once I made it in, Arc and I hit it off immediately. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but every relationship has its ups and downs in the early stages as you slowly figure out each other’s quirks and rough edges.
Arc for Windows launched in Beta, and boy, could you tell. It was missing plenty of features from the Mac version, yes, but it was also quite buggy and glitchy on its own. More than once, Arc would just refuse to open, requiring me to delete all stored data, removing all my search history and saved logins.
Still, I fell into a nice routine. My workflow reshaped itself around Arc’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the things that excited me most were consistent, weekly updates which almost always added some new feature from Mac. With each new feature, it felt like the capabilities of Arc were compounding. Each new tool in the toolbox felt like getting a new superpower to use in my everyday browsing. This feels weird to say for software, but the pacing was great: every time I had gotten used to a new feature, another one would drop.
Of course, the real test of any relationship is what happens when the honeymoon period ends. Can you settle into a routine and keep that spark alive? Are those things inherently contradictory, or can you find the mythical middle ground?
In retrospect, the red flags started showing up before Arc for Windows even left Beta. Slowly, the rate of new features being added slowed, then stopped. Okay, I thought, this makes sense for now. They’re preparing for open availability and want to squash as many bugs as they can.
But one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the Beta label was dropped and Arc for Windows officially launched. Frankly, they were not ready for this. The Windows version was still really buggy and hitched often, not to mention still missing plenty of features from the Mac version.
I kept waiting for that feeling of constant novelty I had at the start of our relationship, during those heady early days when everything was new and exciting and constantly changing. Instead, Arc began to stagnate. No new features were dropping, even on Mac, and the ever-present bugs seemed to be being ignored.
It was in these times of uncertainty that I began, well, reading too much into things (which is a habit I’m trying to break when I face uncertainty in any relationship). YouTube updates from the company, tweets from the CEO would be broken down for clues on the attitude of the people working on Arc. They kept teasing an ‘Arc 2.0’, a secret project to totally revamp Arc with new features ready for the age of AI. I was (and remain) highly skeptical of AI integration into my tech products, but I was holding onto this hope—that Arc and I might find our way back to those exciting days when everything about the browser should be questioned, and no change was too radical to be considered.
Maybe the reason they haven’t updated Arc in so long is because they’re waiting to drop a bunch of new features at once. Maybe it’s such a big change that they just need more time to prepare for it. Maybe my investment of time and energy into this browser will pay off.
But, like most times I read too much into things, the simplest explanation was the correct one. In a YouTube video released in October,[2] they came clean. They stopped updating Arc because they had, simply, lost interest. They’re a tech startup, which means they caught the AI bug. Their next product would be an AI-centric browser.
Their initial claim was that Arc was just… complete, and they didn’t want to add more features to it which might muddy its purpose. Given the state of Arc for Windows, I seriously doubted this explanation. In a Substack post from May 2025,[3] they got a little more honest.
Basically, Arc was too niche to ever break into the mainstream market the way they had hoped. They had made something that was so out there, so opinionated, that it just bounced off most people. The users who stuck around loved it, but it was never going to scale to a billion users like they apparently wanted.
Here’s the thing, though: I always thought that was the point.
I assumed (naively?) that they understood what the project they were building was: namely, a browser for people like me. Technology enthusiasts, people who love to tinker with their workflow, to see what happens when you remove everything but the essentials from your setup just to see what happens.
Like many relationships, my time with Arc ended after a slow, heartbreaking realization that we weren’t on the same page about what we wanted. It wasn’t even that we drifted apart—we were never aligned, and I just didn’t know it.
They wanted the mass market, but I wanted something just for me.
For a while after the October announcement, I tried to hang on. No other browser quite fit the Arc-shaped hole in my heart. But I also couldn’t lie to myself: Arc was falling apart. It was getting dramatically slower, the search bar had several seconds of input delay, UI icons started disappearing, and fullscreening video stopped working right. These bugs never got fixed, they just built and built.
By the time of that May Substack post, it was clear there was no going back. I downloaded Firefox that day.
The tragic truth is that the most efficient way to understand what you want in a good relationship is to have bad ones. The most direct line to personal growth involves getting hurt, and hurting others.
What have I learned from this failed relationship? Well, in the future I’m going to be more wary of relying so much on flaky, closed-source tech startups who could just abandon their products at the drop of a hat. I’m also going to be more skeptical about a VC-backed company who pinky-promises to faithfully serve a market that is far too niche to ever pay the bills for dozens of employees over five years.
Firefox isn’t the same, of course. There are things I still miss about Arc (why does no one else let me rename tabs?), but through extensions and setting tweaks, I’ve actually gotten it much closer to the idealized idea of a web browser I have in my heart. There’s even a few things I like better—it’s way faster, for one, and not being based on Chromium lets the original, better UBlock Origin work fine. I don’t miss Arc nearly as much as I thought I would.
I think I just need to accept that Arc was a moment in time, and that moment has passed. It does no good to dwell in what could have been, when there’s so much I can do to make my life better now.
So long, Arc. It really was a pleasure.