trying arc for windows (as a non-memoji pfp)

ALARMA: this was supposed to be an article about both the windows and ios version, but ended up only being about the windows version. i don't feel like editing this article because i don't like writing, i just like putting my thoughts on a screen (if that makes sense)

arc is a web browser created by the browser company of new york. for the longest time, it was only available on macOS, so you know exactly what type of audience this browser was made for. the main gimmick of the browser is that it's designed to

save you as much time as possible.
Arc Frequently Asked Questions

in reality, arc is a quirky browser. much of the appeal of using it comes from how fun and full of detail the interface is. i tried emulating some of the companies signature quirkiness on this page, but in a more bootleg style
essentially, this is a browser for people who make their profile picture a memoji and have the apple logo and/or letter x mathematical alphanumeric symbol (frequently known as the X logo) in their twitter display name. if you didn't understand that (which you probably didn't), this is a browser for millenials.
almost every review that you will see online is written by someone who fits this personality. i don't fit this personality, so it's time for me to give my honest thoughts.

windows

the windows version of arc is notable for being the first windows app to be built with swift. swift is an apple programming language, i guess.
i've had access to the windows version of arc for quite some time now, basically since the start, so i have been able to watch this thing grow for quite some time now. at the start, all of the documentation was written in notion (millenial browser for people who have a mac). now, there's little to no documentation.
recently, the browser was officially released in version 1.0. this means the browser no longer has the excuse of being in beta.

summary for windows

if you cared enough to find this obscure blog but not enough to read it all, here is everything you need to know:

• spaces are actually kinda cool
• currently has less features than the PS5 has games (and the ps5 has like 4)
• buggy and has some weird ui choices

tabs

the mac version of arc uses an interface that is almost identical to this proposed sidebar design from the early days of chrome os:

this works well because on a mac, the window buttons are docked on the left side of a window. on windows, however, the window buttons are on the right side of the screen. the arc team made a lot of prototype designs to try and deal with this, but in the end they added a status bar to the top of the screen. i'll get back to that.
the main gimmick of arc is the sidebar, the place where everything happens. if you've used microsoft edge vertical tabs, that's basically how the entire browser functions.

one of the main things about arc is organization of tabs. there are 5 levels of organizing tabs. here they are, listed in order from most prominent to least prominent:

• profiles
• favorite sites
• pinned tabs
• tab folders (folders can be nested inside each other)
• unpinned tabs

spaces are basically different windows, but located inside the same window. the current space can be switched by swiping through them with touch gestures, or clicking a dot on a page indicator. once again, mac focused browser. each space can be assigned a theme and a profile. a profile is basically a new browser profile, or new user. a different set of cookies, logins, extensions, you know. each profile can be used by more than one space. if you have used account containers in firefox, you will know this is actually really useful. you cannot currently reorder spaces. i sent an email to the arc team about this and they said they will consider adding this.

first off, there are favorited sites. favorited sites are persistent across the profile you're using, so they appear on all spaces in the profile. these appear in a grid at the top of the sidebar, and they are for tabs you frequently access. this is where you put your github, gmail, calendar, etc.

below favorited pages lies the rest of your tabs. each space has its own set of tabs. you can also create folders for tabs to better organize them. tabs can be pinned to the top of a space. a cool thing about a pinned tab is that you can click its favicon to return to the page it was set to when you pinned it. for example, if i pinned google documents, i could open a document, and i could click the favicon to return to the google docs homepage.

the important thing about tabs in arc is that unpinned tabs are automatically archived (that's the arc term for closing a tab) after a duration set by you. the idea is that if you want to save something for later, you should pin it. on top of that, there is also a button to quickly close all unpinned tabs in a space.

closed tabs are stored in the archive, which currently is just a list of recently closed tabs.

themes are a fun feature. you can assign each space a theme, which consists of a color. the windows version of arc also supports showing gradient themes, although you cannot set them unless you have a mac and sync the browser data to windows. this is somewhat misleading because this feature is shown on the landing page for the windows version of arc.

one thing i really don't like is the quirky color picker for choosing the theme color. this is one of the literal definitions of change for the sake of change.

you change the color by dragging inside of the "touch area". for some reason the touch area is a solid color, despite offering a wide spectrum of colors. this forces you to guess what color you're selecting, unless you use a preset. another fun thing is that the selection area is a square, but the color selector itself is a circle. confused yet?
note that this is intentionally designed this way. it's the exact same way on mac, and it appearantally causes a lot of people to just not want to interact with the color picker.

tab views

aside from the standard tab view, there are also 2 different ways to view tabs:

• popup - if you open a tab with a _blank attribute (opens in a new tab) from a pinned or favorited tab, the opened tab will appear as a popup. from here, you can browse the page, add the tab to the sidebar, or open it in a split view with the current tab. i really like this actually, but most of the time i just end up opening the tab in the sidebar
  
• split view - split view allows you to have 2 tabs open at once, and they appear side by side. imagine opening 2 windows and putting them side by side, but now its in the same window. vivaldi has a similar feature (but better), and microsoft edge recently copied this feature. the main difference with this and the vivaldi implementation is that in arc, both tabs take up the same spot in the sidebar. you can also only have a vertical split.

features

i already went through basically all of them except sync. there is a settings menu, where you can configure sync, view a member card it generates for you, and change the window material to mica to acrylic. it's nice this is an option, but it's such a weird thing for an initial release, especially when it's one of 2 settings.

other settings do exist, but they're just the chromium default settings, inside of the chromium default settings page.

design quirks

there are some things about the arc browser that you have to get used to. the first is that there is no new tab page. when you click new tab, a command bar is opened, where you can type your url or search. whenever im not doing anything in the browser, i like to keep it on the new tab page. this is a habit i have had for almost my entire life, so getting used to this is frustrating, but i can manage.

another thing is the status bar. this is where the page url and other buttons live. instead of an omnibox, the top level domain is displayed at the top of the page. clicking it will open the same command bar as opening a new tab, but instead it will be filled with the page url. this is especially annoying because it adds 1 extra step to changing a url, and due to the smaller size of the command bar, longer urls are harder to see. extensions also live in a submenu here.

i've been really negative of this browser so far, but i will say, it does a really good job at looking like a windows app. i really respect the arc team for this, instead of using their own design. they went all out for this, and it looks beautiful. it looks more like a windows app than the official windows apps by microsoft.

with that said, the signature charm from the mac version is completely missing from the windows version. the closest thing to charm arc for windows has (in my opinion) is that holding on the refresh icon does an animation where it abruptly spins 90 degrees. this animation is too long to see when just clicking the icon.

also, this is a small thing, but for the arc menu, it feels like they just picked loosely related icons for everything. why is windows hello the incognito icon?

final opinion

the windows version of arc is a good start, but it released way too early. a lot of users on the subreddit have been reporting many issues and bugs. i would take this over google chrome, but that's it.