For a year or two, my browser of choice was Arc. Arc was a relatively new entrant by The Browser Company of New York. I learned about it because somebody told me about it while we were on a call, completely unprompted. It was that good. The browser wasn’t just a lot of good and novel ideas, it had good taste, and the company behind it was shipping fast and working in a refreshingly transparent way. I didn’t know the whole story behind why the company decided to stop working on it and are now building a new, maybe-a-browser that is really an AI chatbot. I found the decision unfortunate and baffling. The company wrote a lot in this substack article about their thought process, but they don’t really answer the question for me.

It’s true that for all of its polish and creativity, Arc did have some unresolved UX issues: the way “Little Arc” modals worked, opening a new tab didn’t actually open a new tab, the squished address bar, the distracting UI animation whenever I selected or deselected text. And I still ended up with a lot of tabs, workspaces, folders, that once created tended to fossilize. Cleaning it all up was a chore that I didn’t have any interest in doing. But all of those issues could’ve been smoothed out over time.

I ended up switching to Vivaldi, and with a lot of customizing, I managed to create an Arc-like experience that works ok. But I still end up with a long list of tabs in the sidebar - even though there’s a clear hierarchy and grouping of which tabs go together. It also doesn’t look great, and they’re pushing a VPN now.

I don’t need an AI chatbot in my browser. I don’t need my browser to be completely rethought. I don’t need a VPN, or cryptocurrency, or a Downloads manager (I already have Finder!), or my browser disallowing me from using extensions like uBlock Origin. But my browser automatically keeping my tabs organized for me, that lets me rearrange and close all tabs from a single topic? Now that would be really useful.

Why doesn’t this exist yet? Is it cost? Is it privacy? Both could be resolved by optionally using on-device processing and only sending the title, time opened, and domain for each tab to the LLM. Based on my own testing, LLMs are up to the task of categorizing tabs, as well as renaming them so that the bit you see in the sidebar is relevant. I’m confident that a browser like this, that kept things simple, and automatically grouped and organized your tabs for you, would be a huge success. Please build it.

…and if you are working on it, let me know.