Under the hood, the rendering engine is based on the same Chromium browser engine that underlies Chrome, Edge, Brave, and basically every browser that isn’t Firefox (or Apple’s Safari) these days. Websites you visit should work just as well as they do in Chrome. And it supports all the browser extensions Google Chrome supports — you can install extensions from the Chrome Web Store right in Arc.
But Arc is all about the interface — it offers a totally different way of dealing with tabs, bookmarks, profiles, and all the usual browser things we interact with every day as we’re going about our business chores.
Chris Hoffman, IDG
Are today’s web browsers stuck in the past?
Clearly, browser innovation has slowed. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, even Safari: Sit down in front of any of them, and you’ll see the same basic setup. Arc brings some overdue new ideas to the competition.
It feels like the last big innovation was Google Chrome launching a multi-process browser in 2008. (Though don’t forget the transformative change Firefox brought when it delivered tabbed browsing to the masses in 2004.) The web has changed a lot in the last 16 years. So, why haven’t browsers launched that rethink how we use the web in a big way to keep up with our evolving work and productivity habits?
That’s the idea behind Arc. It’s not just a new browser with a few unique features. It has some powerful ideas about how you use the web and how that can be different and better — how everything from your workday tasks to your personal browsing can be faster, more productive, and generally just better.
The Browser Company is also working on bringing a variety of AI features to the Arc experience as part of Arc Max. None of these AI features is available in the Windows version yet — they’re experimental and being tested in the Mac version. (Everyone’s adding AI features to everything — have you seen all the AI features Microsoft has already added to Windows 11?)
