I am not a regular user of the Arc browser, as I’ve mentioned before. But that’s been for personal-preference reasons: I close my tabs very often, so the UI that was oriented toward lots of tabs, open for a long time and neatly organized, wasn’t the tradeoff that I wanted. I definitely wrote a tweet or two about how Arc, despite being a very new browser, was not a new browser engine but another Chromium project - something that’s technically true and annoying but irrelevant for most people. See also, all the projects that say that they’re an “operating system” but end up being Android skins or layers on Linux.
Anyway, The Browser Company is no longer going to focus on Arc and they’re going to build something new. There’s a good YouTube video about this from their CEO. I have some thoughts.
- The user-base size that consumer-facing startups need to meet expectations is just unfathomable because their average revenue per user rounds to zero. Arc is wildly successful but it needs to be just outstandingly successful to succeed. Right now it’s very popular in tech circles, but consumer software tech startups need to be popular like Amazon or Walmart.
- One of the most interesting take-aways from the video is the idea that “Arc is a power-user tool” with a learning curve. This is true in the mildest sense, but that is enough. The median user’s appetite for complexity is near-zero. Apps should have one or two main actions per screen. Swiping is fine. Forms shouldn’t have more than one input. AI is perfect for this: AI interfaces are just a button and a textfield, but the level of gratification and sense of power they give is infinite. See The World Beyond Your Head for why I’m so obsessed with this idea.
- The Browser Company has been doing an industry-leading job of being human. Their YouTube channel is great. Josh has ‘looked and talked like a human’ since way before Mark Zuckerberg got his gold chain and personal stylist. The product has “done well on social.” This had enormous upside, and I think that it has really affected the reaction to this news about Arc: when Google discontinues products, people don’t tweet at Sundar Pichai, but people feel connected to this company, for better or worse. The Browser Company feels like a collection of normal, nice people, which is part of what makes the news tricky: VC-backed startups are not reasonable, normal, or happy with good results. They need to shoot the moon, not create a fairly successful, well-loved macOS app. This applies to all of them, including the ones that I’ve worked at, and it’s just part of the deal. But it’s a set of expectations that no ordinary person would arrive at if they were building a company from scratch without these incentives.
- I had a call with Josh before The Browser Company had started development, and there was just a general direction that things could be better, not any particular features or specific ideas in mind. That was a reason why I didn’t engage that much further at that point, but I’m astounded by how many good ideas did come out of The Browser Company for Arc. You can’t manufacture inspiration but they did a really good job of being both creative and methodical and creating something compelling. This makes me pretty optimistic for their next product, though I’m not really the target market for AI-centric computing, just as I’m not the target market for tab-hoarding user interfaces. I am the target market for high-end bicycles, what else, I’m not sure.
- There are a bunch of ‘alt browsers’ like Horse Browser, Zen, and surely others that I’m forgetting. Horse is mostly Pascal, which is cool. Really great macOS software has, for decades, been created by companies shaped a lot different from modern venture-backed startups. Panic, iA, Alfred and Omni, for example, are very unique companies with traditional business models that produce software comparable to that made by startups aiming for the multi-billion valuations. There are different ways to win the race.