Stop me if this sounds familiar: The Browser Company is creating a browser that it believes can make your Internet life a little more organized, a little more useful, and maybe even a little more enjoyable. You have new ideas about tabs and what your browser can do for you.
I’ve heard this story before! But the browser that Josh Miller, CEO of Browser Company, wants to talk about when he calls me on Thursday isn’t Arc, the product he and his team have been working on for the past five years. It’s not Arc 2.0 either, although Miller has been speaking publicly about Arc 2.0 for a while now. It is a completely new browser. And for Miller and The Browser Company, it’s a chance to get back to building the future of browsers they set out to create in the first place.
Something strange has happened in recent years, Miller says. Arc has grown rapidly (users quadrupled this year alone), but it has also become clear that Arc will never be a truly mainstream product. It’s too complicated, too different, too difficult to approach. “It’s too much newness and change,” Miller says, “to reach the number of people we really want to reach.” Interviews and user data have convinced the company that this is a tool for power users, and always will be.
On the other hand, people who use Arc tend to love Arc. They love the sidebar, they love having spaces and profiles, they love all the customization options. Generally speaking, those users have also adapted to Arc: Miller says they don’t want new features, but rather their browser to be faster, smoother, and more secure. And it’s fair!
Then The Browser Company faced a situation that many companies face: they had a beloved product that was never going to be a game-changer. Instead of trying to make the next thing the next thing, and risk alienating the people who like it and never reaching the people who don’t like it, the company decided to just build something new.
Arc isn’t dying, Miller says. In fact, he says it over and over again, even after I tell him. the youtube video the company just launched sounds like what companies say good before they kill a product. It’s just that Arc won’t change much anymore. You’ll receive stability updates and bug fixes, and there’s a team at The Browser Company dedicated to that. “In that sense,” Miller says, “it feels like a complete product.” Most of the team’s energy and time will now be devoted to starting from scratch.
“Arc was basically this front-end tab management innovation,” Miller says. “People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it started to get slow and started crashing a lot, we felt bad and had to learn to do it fast. And we kind of lost sight of the fact that we have to deal with the operating system part.”
The plan this time is to build not just a different interface for a browser, but an entirely different type of browser: one that is much more proactive, more powerful, more AI-focused, and more in line with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or the “Internet computer,” or whatever other metaphor you prefer. The idea is to turn the browser into an application platform. Miller still wants to do it and wants to do it for everyone.
What does that look like? Miller is a bit vague on the details. The new browser, which Miller hints could launch early next year, is designed to have no switching costs, meaning, among other things, it will have horizontal tabs and fewer ideas about organization. The idea is to “make the first 90 seconds effortless” so that more people switch. And then, little by little, reveal what this new browser can do.
Miller has a couple of favorite examples of how a browser can help you do things, and he told me about it in Decoderand elsewhere in recent months. There’s the professor who spends hours copying and pasting data between business applications; Shopify sellers who spend too much time looking up order numbers and then pasting them into customer support emails. That’s the kind of thing a browser, with access to all your web applications and browsing data, could start doing on your behalf. And with AI tools like Anthropic’s new “Computer Usage” feature, that kind of thing is starting to become automated and possible.
Designing a browser that is accessible to everyone and is completely new will not be easy. The Browser Company already tried once and ended up here. But Miller feels good about creating a good browser over the last five years. Now it’s time to get back to real work.