Originally published at: Arc Search iPhone App Now Syncs Arc Sidebar Tabs - TidBITS
An update to the Arc Search app for the iPhone gives Arc users using macOS and Windows access to all their tabs and the ability to save pages from the iPhone to the Arc sidebar.
I still have Arc installed on my Mac, but after a bit of initial tests I havenāt returned to it. I found it sort of āslippery and slidingā to use. I have been meaning to try again.
One question I had was about tab groups. I find them very useful in Chrome and was wondering if they are ābetterā in some way in Arc. Like less cluttering maybe?
Iām not sure I could easily get used to tabs on the side though. Is there a reason for that? Thatās just the default, right?
Yes, @douglerner, very apt: āI found it sort of āslippery and slidingā to useā. Far worse than some things in Apple Mail, Arc has too many things that act, or move, or turn into something else, just because I moused over them. I really dislike that type of UI. Just give me an auto-help title or an indicative cursor, no more, when all I do is move the mouse over something. Arc has little chance with me for regular use, much less work, due to this too-clever pseudo-helpful interface.
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I havenāt used tab groups in Chrome, but Arc lets you collect tabs in folders. Because Arc eliminates the awkward split between tabs and bookmarks, itās much easier to understand. If you want to keep track of a page in the future, you make it a pinned tab, and if you want to collect a set of similar pinned tabs, you put them in a folder.
No, itās the only place tabs appear in Arc, and itās much easier to use and more sensible because each tabās title remains readable no matter how many you have, and you can easily scroll if they donāt fit. Thatās why nearly every Mac app that lists an arbitrary number of something has a vertical sidebar, like the Finder, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Contacts, etc. Top-mounted tabs donāt scale, so they only work when there is a small (and preferably fixed) number of tabs.
Menus use essentially the same information architecture. You have a small and relatively fixed number of menus horizontally in the menu bar, but each one can contain a lot of commands vertically.
I tried Arc when it first went publicly available and found the ideas interesting but overwhelming. I went back to Safari and decided to try multiple profiles, browsing with the sidebar on, etc. to mimic Arc. It was painful because everything is just so much more cluttered in Safari.
This update completely changes the way I browse on desktop and mobile. Mobile tabs being disposable unless I want to keep them makes a ton of sense. I used to use Safari for my main browsing and something simple like DuckDuckGo for quick one off searches. Now Arc handles everything for me. The desktop sidebar with vertical tabs is game changing for keeping this organized. Everything about Arc is just so much more visibly and interactively simpler than Safari and I love it.
The only thing I miss is some of the Apple exclusives: keychain integration, integration with delivered login codes via Messages, etc. But Iām willing to give those up because Arc is so much better in everything else. I canāt wait to see this thing evolve.
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What is āpinningā a tab then in this case?
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The Arc sidebar has two sections. Pinned tabs live at the top, and temporary āTodayā tabs live at the bottom. By default, Arc archives Today tabs after a user-specified amount of time, so they donāt collect indefinitely like in other browsers. A pinned tab combines the concepts of bookmarks and tabsāitās persistent in the interface like bookmarks, but it opens in place rather than creating a new tab like in other browsers. The screenshot below shows the bottom of the pinned tabs section of the sidebar and the top of the Today tab portion in one of my four spaces.
I was just trying it again and found it amazingly confusing. I guess itās something you appreciate after you get used to it.
In Chrome the tabs you have open are there. As are the tag groups. They stay live, which I find convenient. And after restarting Chrome they are automatically restored.
In Arc I see bookmarks that were automatically brought over from Chrome. It was hard wading my way through them. I was actually looking for my tabs and tab groups from Chrome. Is there a way of bringing those over? Or do they need to be recreated tab-by-tab and group-by-group?
I havenāt tried to import into Arc for about a year, obviously, but I donāt think any browser can import anotherās tabs or tab groups.
Looking at Chrome now, tabs remain as ephemeral as ever, and making them into groups seems like a way of reducing but not solving the information overload problem inherent in top-mounted tabs. But itās all too easy to close a tab inadvertently or, if Chrome crashes, to lose all your open tabs. (Been there, done that, many times before switching to Brave and then Arc. The only solution is to restore the entire Chrome folder from Time Machine.)
You can pin tabs in Chrome, which prevents accidental closing, but pinned tabs canāt be in groups, thus eliminating them as a useful way of organizing more than a handful of sites.
Safari does far better, putting tabs in a sidebar where you can read their names, allowing them to be grouped, and allowing groups to have a mix of pinned and unpinned tabs. Safariās approach is pretty close to where Arc is, albeit without the concept of separate workspaces.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Iāve built up four workspaces with probably hundreds of pinned tabs. Almost anything I do regularly on the Web, I can access with a couple of keystrokes or clicks. And I can get to it all on the iPhone in Arc Search with a few taps too.
Iām still looking over and thinking about your post here. Iām sure there are always better ways of doing things, and Iām open to maybe trying.
Just with regards to this though - that doesnāt happen to me. Even if Chrome crashes, all the tabs and groups are restored when it restarts.
It doesnāt happen on every crash, but I restored the Google Chrome folder more times than I would have liked over the years of using it. Early on, there was a single file that maintained all the tabs, but at some point that changed, and I had to restore the entire folder to get tabs back. And with the 75-150 tabs that I had open at any given time, I was very concerned about getting them back.
It was two things that held me back from setting Arc Search as default web browser. The missing tab sync and that it did not work in landscape. Now it does and I have it as default.
The only thing I dislike is the bottom menubar (the one with + in the center). It takes up too much space in landscape.
I wasnāt used to the concept of pinned tabs, but read up a bit more about them. Google Chrome documentation says:
Pin a tab: Right-click the tab and select Pin . Pinned tabs are smaller and only show the siteās icon.
I just tried that. I also had no trouble adding the pinned tab to a group.
Articles is the new group I created and there are two pinned tabs in there now. I still donāt know the purpose of pinning though. I did a command+W on one of the pinned tabs and the tab closed. What do you mean by āaccidentalā closing?
Iām trying to grasp all of this, but obviously Iām missing some points. 
In trying to nail down what the purpose of pinned tabs really are (in Chrome anyway) I got this reply from the Google Chrome forums:
It just makes it smaller, so if someone walks up and looks at your tabs, you have some privacy. It can also make it easier to have tons of tabs open;conserving space.
So far I canāt see any other difference either.
Huh. Your Chrome looks different from mine, and I cannot drag a pinned tab into a group. There are two pinned tabs on the left and then two tab groups, one open (Stuff), the other closed (Bother).
I think youāre right that pinned tabs in Chrome are only special in terms of their small size and left-hand location. They arenāt more permanent the way Arc and Safari pinned tabs are.
So that makes them even more useless!
This whole discussion is getting a bit confusing to me but I did want to clarify one point. I didnāt ādragā a pinned tab into a group. Iāve never dragged a tab into a group. What I do it right-click on the tab and from there choose to add it to a group.
Sure, thatās another way to add a tab to a group, but dragging is easier.
Regardless, the upshot is that Chromeās pinned tabs are bogus. Theyāre merely small and left-aligned and not special in any other way. Nor can they be added to tab groups and retain their pinned status.
I canāt believe how completely and utterly lost I am in trying to figure out Arc. I guess in the end it just comes down to personal preference.
Yesterday I tried doing things like reading news sites I usually read every morning in Chrome. The side menu taking up so much space was driving me crazy. At the top at least the tabs and tab groups (and pinned tab groups) are out of your way and not distracting.
Yes, I know you can hide the side menu. But it keeps popping up when you want to move around. I honestly donāt get it.
I admit that it might be just me. I wish I could have a āmental breakthroughā and see what you like about it.