On Tuesday, The Browser Company made its unusual new web browser, Arc, widely available on desktop for the first time.
I downloaded it this morning, and have been setting it up and familiarizing myself with its UI over the past few hours. First thoughts…it takes some getting used to, but I’m beginning to really like its organization potential.
I have been giving it a fair shot the past few days. It does some things I really like. I like the UI, after some initial learning curve I really like the way it handles tabs and spaces. The PIP for music/videos is really nice. Dragging a tab into my current window for a split view has actually been a really nice experience. As somebody who uses Notes an embarassing amount, Easels have actually been a good middleground between that and something like Evernote.
It has the biggest learning curve for a browser I have ever used, which does make me consider for how much widespread appeal it will have. I haven’t even touched a lot of their features I think.
However my biggest concern, coming from Safari, it seems like a huge resource hog. I am using it on my desktop so it’s…okay, but I have never got the fans on my iMac going from a browser before. I couldn’t imagine the battery impact on a notebook.
To be fair, they are aware of the resource usage and are apparently working on that in upcoming releases, but we will see. I am not confident they can get a Chromium based browser to be much more optimized. If they can get that down a bit, I might consider using it more longterm.