Update May 6, 2024: The Browser Company has finally released Arc on Windows out of beta. It’s available through this link.
Original article, December 15, 2023:
The web browser Arc has been around for Mac users for a while and is now introduced to Windows users. The company behind Arc wants to move away from competitors such as Chrome and Bing and is trying to provide a better online experience for those working with multiple tabs open at once.
We saw on several news sites that Arc will be available for Windows and wondered whether we should really be as excited about this as we are being talked about. So, we look further into what exactly The Browser Company, the company behind Arc, wants to offer.
Not a parody of the existing
A simpler access portal to all online info is how we would describe our first impression of Arc. Several tabs can be divided into groups, which the user can name for organization. Searching is done with built-in functionalities to search in one specific website.
For example, it is possible to indicate within Maps to search for a Thai restaurant. To accomplish this with Chrome, the user must type in “site:maps” before starting a search. Knowledge of these abbreviations is no longer necessary with Arc. Moreover, the browser immediately sends the user to the search result in the desired site, where Chrome will always show the search results window. That saves several mouse clicks.
Switching to Arc’s browser experience, however, would not be without difficulty, according to reviews. That’s because The Browser Company has not built on the principles on which web browsers are built today. Mainly for the tab chaos that can be quickly created when browsing online, the browser should bring peace of mind. This includes a feature that closes open tabs automatically every 12 hours and makes it easier to find accidentally closed websites again with the content the user had opened when the tab was closed.
The biggest difference for the user will be the bar on the side of the browser instead of at the top. The company prefers this approach to be able to divide a user’s digital life more into a folder structure.
Is Arc’s market share worth anything?
Arc for Windows is currently still in the testing phase. Therefore, a small group of users will have access, while 500,000 waiting will have to count down to 2024. Starting in January, the company says it is ramping up the rollout rapidly.
So, 500,000 Windows are already on board. Those users are enormously enthusiastic, and since the general availability of the browser on Mac (July 2023), they have stepped up the pressure to make a Windows variant available as well.
The Browser Company is not transparent about the number of users on Mac. Consequently, an accurate comparison with competing web browsers cannot be made. Considering that the number of monthly unique users of Bing in 2022-2023 is 1.3 billion, according to Statista, we dare say that Arc still has a lot of ground to gain. Especially since Bing only has a market share of 2.79 percent globally. Chrome has a market share somewhere 33 times higher.
The high market share of the search engine Google Search is, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, the result of Google’s unfair competitive position and payments to Apple to provide the search engine as standard in Apple products. According to Google, there is no such thing, and its dominance in the search engine market is purely due to quality. A verdict on the lawsuit, by the way, is pending.
Read also: The days of unconstrained growth and bundling seem to be over for Big Tech
Lots of potential
We can at least acknowledge that The Browser Company has strong assets to grow into something successful. For example, Darin Fisher joined The Browser Company team about a year ago. Fisher previously worked as VP of engineering at Google. There, he was involved in everything surrounding Chrome. In fact, he was one of the founders of the browser as we still know it today. Fisher worked for the competing web browser for 15 years, but while there, he felt he was too severely restricted in what he could do by Chrome’s revenue model.
Arc is a new player in the browser and search engine market, bringing refreshing ideas to the digital experience. With European and foreign regulators taking a stricter approach to ensure that the power of Big Tech does not immediately kill new players in the market, Arc has a favourable environment. Even if, in time, this competition should only prove important in getting Big Tech to try a little harder to keep users attached, the digital world will still benefit.
Also read: Apple builds its own search engine: serving Apple users or mere threat?
Image: The Browser Company