That may be exactly the issue the developers are facing. Arc as a UI paradigm is almost exactly what I was looking for. But at heart it’s a mashup of a browser and a good URL manager, and it does require some commitment to recognizing and organizing one’s browsing habits. There just aren’t going to be a lot of folks out there who see the need to do that.
As a side note, I have 17 “spaces” defined in Arc, but as with other Arc users I’m probably in 3 of them most of the time. I could easily adapt back to Safari but for now I find Arc helpful. As you say others don’t need to understand why.
Which is likely another of The Browser Company’s problems.
The two big wins of Arc Search are instant access to all your pinned tabs on the desktop version and quick voice search with an AI answer engine.
I’m really curious to see what a so-called AI browser brings to the game. If it’s just embedding that AI answer engine more deeply, I’m dubious that it will make a difference in the user experience.
Great to see other oboists here. And I play piano, too, so chalk up another “this is musically ignorant” vote for the cited analogy.
I’m keeping my eye on Zen browser, but it’s not there yet. (I’m interested in others’ opinions about this.) In the meantime, I’ll keep using 4+ spaces in my Arc setup, but almost certainly won’t be trying Dia. It’s too bad; I was really rooting for them, initially.
Thanks to Adam’s enthusiastic recommendation I switched to Arc and now can’t imagine going back to the conventional browser interface. I don’t use Easels but most other features. Oh well, we can’t control what developers do.
I am retired and most of my computer and iPhone use is to satisfy my curiosity about a wide range of topics. I use Perplexity and NotebookLM a lot and in a sense am “all in” with AI. What I am not interested in is the Apple Intelligence and apparently the Dia idea that your device knows all about you so it can do personal things for you. I find that too intrusive. I don’t want it, but I think it’s coming.
Whether or not Scott Forstall’s analogy was perfect, it was good advice: make a browser with significantly less of a learning curve because Arc’s lack of simplicity was hurting its adoption rate. As TBC’s open letter showed, they felt they couldn’t sufficiently implement simplicity, speed and security on the existing codebase.
I’ve found myself using ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot more as a replacement to what used to be Google/DDG/Brave/Ecosia searches, and their results are stunningly effective (albeit with some ‘hallucinations’ for complex questions), and I think it will be fascinating to see what Dia turns out to be, especially if Forstall continues to offer guidance on what appears to be focused on being an AI agent that browses.
It’s interesting that the company’s CEO is being really transparent that they should have stopped development a year earlier, and that they were “in denial.”
Yes to this. The hanging question for me involves the balance between inviting end users in to your developing app (getting them interested/on board/invested) versus what happens if your roadmap and assumptions weren’t clear and you realize you’ve made a big miscalculation.
TBC is choosing to pivot their resources to another app (presumably using some of the Arc underpinnings), and is left with all that user energy they built for the first product.
It’s not like they screwed up. They solicited user feedback constantly, and kept implementing and refining what users told them we wanted. It just turns out we bought into their sky-high vision of a homebase for all our work, and that turns out to be complicated across the userscape.
I dunno. I’m apprehensive about moving out of this nifty space I’ve just settled, but eventually things will break and the building department will condemn it…
This sort of reminds me of Jef Raskin’s vision of one app to rule them all. His Archy system involved a completely freeform repository of all content (similar to Apple’s Freeform), using zooming (both in and out, to arbitrary levels) and robust search for keeping content organized.
It was a great vision, and I think it may have worked well, up to a point. But trying to integrate the entire Internet/web of content along with your local content may make the system too complicated for ordinary users to manage.
Amusingly, that was Tim Berners-Lee’s criticism of Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard (and Raskin recruited Atkinson to Apple). He loved the hypertext aspects of it, but for the World Wide Web, he needed it to connect different machines.
