My favorite browser is (kind of) dead

the state of browsers recently has been interesting Chrome kind of won I don't think that's debated anymore but what is going on that's kind of unexpected is this Resurgence of other browsers that are chrome-based but offer very different things there's a bunch of them be it the one baked into windows with Edge be it all the crazy things going on with third party browsers or the one that we're here to talk about today Arc oh boy this is going to be a bit of a tough one for me if you didn't already know know I've been a big fan of the arc browser for a bit but that wasn't immediate when I first tried Arc I honestly didn't like it that much it took three attempts of actually committing to the browser for it to actually click for me and become my browser of choice it wasn't for my CTO Mark pushing it on me I probably wouldn't have bothered at all I was happy with chrome but after giving it a real go figuring out the hot keys that I liked getting used to that sidebar and just falling in love with the way the browser operated it became a thing that I quite enjoyed using and not privately either I've been very public with my love of Arc and a lot of you are too I am certain many people you'll probably even see them in the comment section here started using Arc because they discovered it in my content in my videos and that's part of why this one's so hard for me because in one hand I do genuinely feel like I was slightly misled but on the other by transitive property that means I kind of misled y'all as well and I don't want to feel that way I don't want to feel like this thing that so many of us are invested in might actually die soon see that Arc 2. 0 let's see what he actually says about Arc 2. 0 quick so we got two things to share with you today Ark is not going anywhere the product you love is staying put and we're building a brand new product to be honest we're not even sure it's a web browser that's the concern they're done iterating on Arc if you keep going through there are some moments in here that that hurt me and while we've quadrupled the number of people that use ARC every day this year if you extrapolate that out we're not going to get to a billion people using this product this is what I I struggle to Fathom and I'm sorry Josh I hope that me covering this now uh it's a copyright God damn it why do they do this to me I just lost all the monetization I'm going to get for the live anyways thanks Arc before we hear why Arc 2.

0 isn't real we should quickly hear from today's sponsors because Arc just cost me a bunch of money browser base these guys are great they make it way easier to access browsers via apis you know like the Puppeteer type thing let's take a quick uh wait that's an open source repo what oh huh they put out an open source SDK that lets you write plain English to play right and match a schema to get data out of any U URL on the internet if you've done browser automation you should immediately know how nuts this is and if a company is capable of building something as cool as automated playright with AI you know they're good for hosting the browser too browser based it's a cloud platform that hosts your playwright Puppeteer whatever else for your remote browser for you so you can just search the web via API or in most cases AI if You' ever struggled with Puppeteer or playright there's a good chance browser base will make your life easier check them out today at soy. l/ browser base and don't forget to go give a star to stageand this is really really cool anyways I struggle genuinely to Fathom how someone can look at the chart we just saw before and decide it's time to Pivot this is a really good da chart this is really good growth the issue is that their goal isn't to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of dedicated users is to have a billion users like Chrome the goal with the browser company wasn't to make something that is much better for a subset the way he puts it later in the video is he wanted a browser that his mom would use and he didn't build that and on one hand I can sympathize when you have a specific mission in mind which is in this case to reinvent how we use the web and what you get is a subset of people who really like the tool you built but you're struggling to break out of that that does force a moment of reflection are you building the right thing or not my issue is they built something great for me they missed a few dumb things that should be easily fixed that I felt dragged on about for a bit and the result is I don't know if the browser will ever be fixed I hate to keep harping on this point about this chart but I I seriously can't stop thinking about it since they have investors they have to go big they have to become a billion dollar company to justify the money they raised and the money they're spending to try and build something different but you don't have to get there by having a bill users you can get there having a small number of users that actually pay real amounts of money and there are companies that have done this in the general space one of those is superhuman I really like superhuman I was skeptical going in that a what is it 30 bucks a month right now sorry that a $25 a month subscription for a rapper for Gmail for better hot Keys could ever be worth it but it actually is I cannot fathom my life and the amount of email that I do without superhuman at this point and if they were to hit me up and say hey we're actually changing the pricing it's actually 200 a month now I would sigh as I hit accept it is that essential for me superhuman proves that if you build something that is a big enough multiplier on the existing experience even if it isn't valuable to most people because there is no world in which my mom moves to superhuman the same way there's no world in which my mom moves to Ark she's also probably not going to install any AI chat apps on our phone it's just we have to be realistic about those things so if you can make real money on your users because those users are deeper they care more and they're more willing to spend that monthly fee you can make a very successful business by the way if you are actually interested in using superhuman if you are a person that spends more than a few hours a day in email I think it's worth it I'll leave my affiliate Link in the description is just soy dev. l/s superhuman I cannot imagine life without it you're the same appreciate if you use that link I think they give you a discount either way it'll get me paid which is nice cuz I've spent a lot of money on superhuman cuz it's worth it and I pay for it for all my team just for quick reference by the way they're already making almost $40 million a year on an email rapper like what that's a lot of money and their growth is going up they had a similar Plateau to what the arc team's probably feeling right now and managed to break out get that number going up a bunch and the result of that raise which by the way we only have their raise history up till 202 won they're able to raise on a $750 million valuation if they were close to a billion dollar company then they are probably a billion dollar company now like almost certainly and I think most businesses and most CEOs would be envious of the position that Arc is in where they have all of these users and they're not just random users who refuse to spend money they're not the moms of the world they're business people there are people like you and me developers who rely on their browser for the work they do every day they gave me the browser for free and they try to charge me for features that are more targeted towards people like my mom and not me like the AI summaries of random I don't care but if they charg me for I don't know using it for more than a month or for fixing the downloads tab like I complained about earlier like I would be down to pay gladly 30 plus bucks a month for this browser if it would actually be maintained but it doesn't feel like it's going to be and instead of trying to fix that they're going to go for that billion user thing there there's two ways we could think about this either browsers can't make money which is how people felt about email like you can't charge a lot of money for an email app it's kind of funny when you think about it I spend five to six bucks a month to host my email with Google on Google workspaces and then I pay 30 a month to use things with superhuman so I'm paying six times more per user for the app I access my email in than the email service itself but that's because they made something that good and while I can see why there would be concerns that people aren't going to pay for a browser the fact that superhuman can make as much money as they do shows that it's worth at least trying and not leaving behind your most enthusiastic users in the process of pursuing something bigger I have two things I want to discuss first I want to talk about the issues that I'm having that I'm now concerned will never be resolved and second I want to talk about what they're actually going to go do instead the first thing as I just mentioned are the issues that I have there's a lot of things that are going to be hard to solve that they probably won't like Arc will never be on Linux now there isn't a world in which they Port it to Linux when they are done improving the producted platform they're not going to do that and it's not open source so we can't do it instead they're not going to make the windows build much better than it currently is it was a lot of work to get a swift based browser working on Windows and they did it and it got working it's still not the browser I reached to on Windows but I also don't reach the browsers on Windows that often to be fair but it is my favorite browser on my Mac so at least I can use it there right right yeah and I hope that they'll continue to maintain it and make it safer but there are issues for reference the MacBook that I'm using here is not the computer I'm streaming from this computer is wired over HDMI to a Windows machine so the only things I'm doing on this right now are Arc Zen which I couldn't get the video to buffer in properly so we're using Arc still my notion my terminal my editor and a minimal Discord clone that it's not a clone it's a minimal Discord web wrapper so that I can use less resources and have less issues with Discord I do not have much stuff open despite that there are some hilarious performance issues that I run into regularly opening and closing the sidebar is fine I do have one thing that's annoying it slides in and out by default to turn that off there's no setting an arc you have to turn off motion across your entire Mac which I did just so that this no longer slides in and out and causes the content tend to shift a bunch as it doesn't that's not the performance issue that's just a small experience issue the performance issue is this button here collections I have a decent number of things in my downloads folder let's quickly check how many if I go here right click get info okay this is counting subdirectories but I have a a decent number of things in my download folder it is what it is okay the issue is when I click this button not only does it index everything in my downloads folder it tries to render them all in one list so if I accidentally click this button twice which by the way is very easy you are here and if you just tap it it lags to open it lags the whole browser like the frame rate's down to like 2 FPS now and closing it will freeze half the time if I accidentally click this button my browser might just stop working for 30 plus seconds it's so bad it's so bad and it makes me embarrassed to be using this browser when it happens when I'm like screen sharing with somebody I'm turning off reduce motion so we can get the full experience here making sure that animates again cool it does first off see the Jank I was talking about where the thing just slides around it's not their fault the web sucks when you stretch things like that yeah but now when I click this the lag that the frame rate of the scroll here is awful it doesn't stick with the stickiness when I'm scrolling I'm clicking it again it didn't open that time it lagged Froze that time like I clicked it it takes 3 to 5 Seconds to actually open it's it's real bad and if I try to drag something from it somewhere else it it will just freeze entirely all I want and I don't think it's a big ask is a way to cut down the amount of things that are here by default give me the option not to filter by a profile but to limit by I don't know a time span maybe limit it to things I downloaded in the last month or my last 100 downloads these are all I think reasonable asks which is why I made them about a year and a half ago I was in touch with the ark team we had some email back and forth I think I even did a call with them and they told me that the problem here was things that Swift UI does wrong that they planned to fix or work around there was a fix coming in the next update for Ark and more coming in the near future that was over a year ago I tried when that happened and it wasn't it was better but still laggy so I followed up again and said hey I'm still having these issues what's up and the response from an Engel on the team was hey we're still working on it we did ship a performance fix but we have more coming in the next two updates I'll follow up when they've shipped so we can get more information they never followed up I didn't feel like continuing to push it and honestly I had just trained myself to never click this button for any reason but it still annoyed me to no end when I heard this announcement that they were no longer working on improving Ark because it's fine as is I was concerned that that these bugs might exist forever now so I hit them up one last time I hit up the engineer I had chatted with before saying hey man I'm concerned here I really hoped that we would get these updates and that I would get to have the few things that were left that were still broken for me get fixed I'm not even asking for features just like I want to be able to put the sidebar on the right I want to be able to do vertical splits I have a lot of other things like that that I want but I'm not going to push for that I understand they're not going to be adding everything everyone wants but making the thing that's here actually work that's not that big an ask I really don't think it is sadly they did I reported massive Arc performance issues to browse their company over a year ago I was promised a resolution I followed up with the engineers on the team last week they forwarded me to memberships support that's the thing that made me realize this might actually be over they no longer were letting me an engineer with technical issues talk to an engineer who can solve the technical issues they now put a support person in front and when you do that with a team that previously was willing to talk to people like me there's one reason you want to stop burdening those Engineers with a thing that isn't their responsibility anymore it broke my heart it was very very it felt in that moment like the ark team was no longer invested in making Arc a great experience they were okay with the quality of the experience that existed then it really hurt especially because these issues were over a year old and while as Josh clarifies underneath which will get to in a moment the number of people affected by this bug isn't necessarily massive but the size of the performance issue that I was having is massive because it means there's a feature in the browser the download tab that I literally cannot use and because it is always there when you go into this section I've never used spaces or easel or boosts in this View and I didn't even know there was an archive tabs button because I never sit in this View and this would actually been useful and save me some trouble in the past but I don't know that because I can't go in this tab because it locks up my computer half the time I do it it's unacceptable but because it affects a small enough percentage of people I am fearmongering and before I I roast Josh for this take I want to say we did hash things out in DMS we're doing a call soon I hope me doing this video before we schedule the call doesn't mean he's not going to do it I still want to talk with you Josh I will absolutely do a followup if you convince me that I'm wrong here but it is my journalistic reporter Duty both as somebody who reports on the news in the space and has led people towards this browser to report my experience here and share it with those who chose Arc based on the good experiences I had Josh said okay now you're just fear-mongering to get views we've had our entire performance engineering team staffed on Arc non-stop this entire year you can criticize my decision to build a second product but it's not fair to slander my team who has been working their asses off building a novel browser across platforms is extremely hard for a small team if you'd like to DM or email me the details I'd be happy to to jump on it can someone clarify where I slandered the team here also not great viewership I don't make money on views on X I'd be surprised if this video ends up in the top 10 videos I did this month genuinely I'm not doing this for views I've actually lost money covering Arc and using Arc as I've discussed in the past I do it because I like it it is the best browser I've ever used on my computer it's really sad to have the CEO of a company that built a product I genuinely love and promote and give endless free PR to at my own personal cost to be told because I have concerns that I'm fear-mongering and slandering their team it's so unreal I I don't want to harp on things in DMS but there's one thing he said in DMS that really irked me that I don't know how to discuss so I'm just going to air it out here he specifically said we both probably have things we regret saying in this interaction I don't I don't regret a word a said about this I handled this really well he is being emotional I will not take the fall on that one because I have not said anything here I think is worth regretting and if I am incorrect there if any of the people who I trust and look up to can say hey Theo mostly fair but this thing was a bit of a reach and you probably shouldn't have said that I'm down to take that back the fact that he couldn't take the accountability of this being an emotional overreach has me really concerned about the future not just of Arc but of the company and the fact that chat's response immediately is is this just Matt again from the WordPress drama is sad if this wasn't me versus him I would probably be more defensive because I know how easy it is to get into that emotional moment when you're getting pushed back especially if it's like the first time it's really exploded but it is about me so it's hard for me to be that generous and also it's still unacceptable even if I can sympathize with the position the person's in and I absolutely can historically while they've had issues here and there with Arc around things like the security incidents with Firebase they were able to flip the sentiment relatively quickly and generally speaking be good citizens of sentiment and Community Management there weren't many people who used Ark saying that this sucks people will be doing dunks whenever they can but the fact that for the first time users who love the product were really concerned means that he effectively treated me like someone who doesn't use and love the browser he treated me the way he treats all of the haters with dismissal and disdain but the fact that he is the founder CEO and owner of this browser that I love could so quickly throw away my perspective because it doesn't align with what he thinks it should be is very very concerning this is the main topic of the call we're going to do if we are going to do it he needs to understand that his users are not the haters and if the users sound like haters he probably up the followup made it much worse respect him for not sharing my there that said if we're a company that I have relations with and I've like discussed these things before especially if I've ever talked about them publicly I don't care I would have been totally cool with him saying it publicly but I have a lot of respect for him not doing that without explicit permission but then to say I'm experiencing an extreme Edge case that's experienced by less than 0.

1% of the users that is difficult for them to fix because of how I use my OS how I use my OS is I have a downloads folder with more than 200 items in it that's not that weird a use case if you just and again like if my use case is that weird the solution isn't ignore it it's at a setting that doesn't affect the 99. 9% and then fixes the . 1% so if the issue is again that I have too many files in my downloads folder and since I have so many of those it's an absurd amount of things cool find the amount that's too high and draw a cap there it won't affect the rest of the users and it will fix my problem if I don't fit into the box of how you expect your users to work make a small code change that fits into the box it's not that hard I've done all sorts of pagination and rate limiting throughout my career it's not that hard to do they told me they were going to look into it and probably do it but you can't expect any Tech to render thousands of items in a list on demand without issues other people in chat are dropping their numbers here too there's people with small numbers like 400 to 500 files and then people who have 21,000 files yeah thank you chat by the way fact that you guys have been so supportive in this and like get it means a lot because this is this was sad for me I hate accusations like that like slander is a very real accusation and I wouldn't say that about anybody especially somebody who's using my uh I I really hated that I hope we can patch this up and be on better terms genuinely I did follow up here and clarified the exact issue I'm having said 100% cool with you sharing the details I have nothing to hide I also reach out over DMS if You' prefer to continue privately for those who are curious my issue is with downloads specifically when I open open the downloads collection or tab slow to a crawl dropping a single-digit FPS and taking s to respond to my attempts to close it collection features effectively unusable on my machine the reason that I have a lot of files in my downloads folder like just for reference for people who think like I'm downloading all the time kind of what I do is all of my programs for creative stuff export to downloads so when I finish an edit for a video it exports to downloads when I finish an edit for a thumbnail I'm working on it goes to downloads I do that because organizing all of these things is actually impossible for me so instead of pretending I can organize all of it instead I sort by recency and when I need to upload something that I just did it's going to be right there generally speaking I think folder systems and file systems are poorly architected and they're like an artifact of a previous way computers work that we just deal with now but downloads being the place where the thing I just did goes and sorting it by recent has been a game Cher for my organization because I don't have to think about it anymore the thing I need is right there and I'm just going to search forward and find her anyways and I see a lot of people in chat agreeing with with me I use downloads as the only place I put anything yes think the fact that it was first res over a year ago not resolved is the worse yep absolutely having a lot of things in downloads folder doesn't seem unusual and it doesn't seem rare somebody just dropped they have 18, 375 folders in their download directory 130,000 files over a terabyte of stuff it's not that uncommon and the most important thing is where do those users fall because even if it is as he said 0.

1% of users where do they fall in terms of Enthusiast levels if that . 1% are the most DieHard Arc users or in this case or some of your biggest promoters like I am I don't care what percentage of the audience I represent I care how severe is my issue and how easy is it to fix the severity of this issue is relatively High the ease to fix is also relatively high it's very easy to fix this problem but it hasn't been fixed and now that he's thinking about the team differently it doesn't surprise me and that's sad it's really sad to think that I as one of the biggest promoters of Arc and one of the people that has really fell in love with this browser that their response to my actual genuine fears which came from being pwned off to membership support result in this and I'm not super excited for what's coming next either I did manage to download it it was on browse withth 10. com I don't know what it is yet I downloaded it and when I downloaded it by the way it went to my downloads folder so I had to open up finder to click it otherwise my computer would lag I opened it it opened a DMG named Arc the DMG name the dismounted name when you tried to install their new browser that they claim isn't actually them is Arc it's clear they're semi forking internally to build this new browser this wouldn't have happened otherwise and browser.

apppp I installed but very sadly was unable to sign up if I just do fake at gmail.