Arc Of The Broken Covenant

A few years ago, I heard the hype around The Browser Company, the firm that created the Arc browser, and eventually couldn’t help but feel like it was just a bunch of noise.

The company had gotten a lot of goodwill out of its UX-minded discussions about reinventing the Web browser, and those discussions were interesting. But for one reason or another I just wasn’t sucked in—in part because I was already content with my browser of choice, Vivaldi.

But a lot of people I know got sold on the browser that The Browser Company came up with, Arc. That browser, which leaned heavily into design logic and experimental approaches, won a lot of plaudits in a short amount of time. In 2024, the browser’s offshoot mobile product, Arc Search, was a finalist for an Apple Design Award. Given how many iOS apps come out each year, that’s a big deal.

Arc was an influential browser, and likely led Google to add some fresh polish to Chrome. Browser extensions exist that make it possible to make Chrome work more like Arc. Hell, last night I came across an open-source project that allows users to reskin Vivaldi to work like Arc. (I tried it out; amusing, but I’m happy with what I have.)

People loved that browser. But apparently, it wasn’t enough of them, based on a recent post from The Browser Company. The company unusually suggested that it was putting Arc into maintenance mode last fall, in favor of an AI project called Dia; now it is going further, making it clear that it sees Arc as a significant tactical error. From the post, with added emphasis by me:

Switching browsers is a big ask. And the small things we loved about Arc—features you and other members appreciated—either weren’t enough on their own or were too hard for most people to pick up. By contrast, core features in Dia, like chatting with tabs and personalization features, are used by 40% and 37% of DAUs respectively. This is the kind of clarity and immediate value we’re working toward.

But these are the details. These are things you can toil over, measure, sculpt, remove.

The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc—and even Arc Search—were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at the scale of improvements that we aspired to. Or that could breakout as a mass-market product. If we were serious about our original mission, we needed a technological unlock to build something truly new.

Put another way: The Browser Company wants to build the next Chrome but instead built the next Vivaldi. It built a power user’s dream browser, but that wasn’t its goal. Its goal was to build a browser so mind-blowing that it would have an audience of hundreds of millions of people.

The problem with this, of course, is that what hundreds of millions of people use often isn’t loved by hundreds of millions of people. Largely, it is tolerated. When reinventing something, you want to create an audience of true believers. The Browser Company did that—then realized that wasn’t what it wanted. It had an audience and momentum and threw it away in a matter of months because it built a well-loved product instead of a mass-market one. And in the process, it threw away a lot of goodwill that will be difficult to get back.

To be clear, anytime you throw a product away, it causes a knock to your goodwill. Recently, Mozilla announced that it was ditching Pocket, the popular read-it-later tool that it had deeply integrated into its browser, Firefox. It was popular, but Mozilla’s reason for getting rid of it was even muddier than The Browser Company’s labored explanation:

Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.

The outcry was palpable—and Kevin Rose, currently in the midst of relaunching Digg, offered to buy Pocket from Mozilla. (Rose, a reformed internet legend and venture capitalist, knows a thing or two about forcing unwanted change onto a user base.)

These tools are not forgotten products that nobody cared about, or declining products. Pocket had 20 million users and was a fundamental part of Firefox. It also had a working business model. It was significantly more successful than Mozilla’s fediverse play, which ended life with fewer than 300 active users.

Pocket and Arc reflect a mindset that feels downright dangerous in context: We’re now at the point where we’re killing successful products because of the hope that we can build something better, not even because the products were failures. The next things are likely going to have more artificial intelligence and less distinct craft driving them.

And dropping popular products for vibes, even when they’re not declining, just feels like a self-inflicted wound that you’re not even bothering to address. It doesn’t matter how innovative you are, or how many good ideas you have. What actually matters at the end of the day is that you’re offering a consistent product that people can rely on.

No amount of word salad is going to hide the fact that you’re killing successful products for seemingly no good reason.