The excellent Arc browser, which has impressed macOS and iOS users over the past few years, is finally making its way to Windows today. Arc is designed to change the way you use a browser in many fundamental ways, with a fold-out sidebar that combines vertical tabs and bookmarks into an app switcher-like experience, a command bar for navigation, and useful Tools to help you surf the Internet.
The company behind Arc, aptly named The Browser Company, is betting that its browser will be different enough to scare Windows users away from Chrome and Edge. “Arc really calms and brings order,” says Hursh Agrawal, co-founder of The Browser Company, in an interview with The edge. “It helps you better manage your tasks during the day.”
For someone who loves Chrome, using Arc was an unsettling but rewarding experience. Once you get used to the way Arc works, the idea of a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, or just the ability to clear out all the browser clutter and focus on a single website, will seem like a refreshing approach to the Way we use the web today. Arc is also based on Chromium, so websites work easily and you can take your extensions with you.
Arc for Windows is also a significant step in a much larger vision for what The Browser Company calls “the operating system for the Internet” – the idea that Arc is a complete platform for the open web that goes beyond a simple browser. Arc for Windows is an important milestone in this vision, not least because The Browser Company also helped bring Swift, the programming language developed by Apple for building iOS and Mac apps, to Windows.
Arc on Windows is built with Swift, and software developers at The Browser Company have helped make all of the foundational infrastructure for building Windows applications with Swift largely open source. Saleem Abdulrasool, a Swift core team member and software engineer at The Browser Company, has spent more than six years bringing Swift to Windows. “I’m so excited about it,” Abdulrasool said in an interview with The edge. “To finally see something come to fruition after so long is really something. It is truly an effort of love.”
The release of Arc on Windows, thanks to Swift, could encourage other developers to follow a similar path, especially after the White House urged software developers to use memory-safe programming languages like Swift instead of the C++ language used to build Chrome and Edge. “We actually invite others to join in,” says Abdulrasool. “Even though we are leading the charge, we are more than happy to have people come with us.”
For all of Arc’s impressive underpinnings, it still needs to be good enough to compete with Chrome. After all, it’s literally being marketed as “the Chrome replacement you’ve been waiting for,” so there’s a lot to consider with this version of Windows. The browser company will also have to contend with Microsoft’s aggressive attempts to convert Windows users to Edge and dethrone Chrome – a challenge no browser entrant has faced in recent decades of competition.
For Darin Fisher, it’s the latest challenge in a long line of web browsers disrupting the status quo. Fisher joined The Browser Company in late 2022. His career began at Netscape in the early 2000s, before helping transform Navigator into Firefox and then spending 16 years developing Chrome and ChromeOS.
Fisher argues that there is a gap in the market for Arc and that competing browsers are stagnating. “I saw the transition at Google as people moved from Internet Explorer and Firefox to people suddenly using Chrome,” Fisher said in an interview with The edge. Internet Explorer was stagnating and Chrome struck at just the right time with a better product. That’s what The Browser Company wants to emulate.
This is also being tried with new tools. “How do you deal with this complexity of our lives? We need tools to help us stay where we are, that’s what Arc is all about,” says Darin. In the macOS version, you can customize web pages to change their color palette, play around with new AI features, or create shareable websites. Not all of these popular features are available in the Windows version yet, but the basic features such as sidebar, panels, profiles, split view and picture-in-picture are already available to Windows users today.
Fortunately, Arc will continue to evolve every week, which will be important as the Windows version grows in terms of features to reach parity with the macOS version. “I think it’s scary for some people, but it’s getting better every week,” Agrawal says. “People say it’s like getting Christmas presents every Thursday.”
The goal is to build on the Windows version and remove some of the Mac features that aren’t commonly used until they’re equivalent as a single app. “The experience [of Arc on Windows] “It’s good, but it’s not there yet and we’re going to ship it every week to get it to a place where it’s incredible,” admits Agrawal.
Most importantly, Arc on Windows doesn’t feel like a macOS app. The Browser Company has used Microsoft’s WinUI framework to follow Windows 11’s Fluent design language, and you can even customize the window background on Mica to match Arc’s background to your desktop, or on Acrylic to create a transparent one to achieve a blur effect.
Arc for Windows is also initially only supported under Windows 11; a version for Windows 10 is planned soon. And while Google recently released a native ARM64 version of Chrome for Windows, Arc won’t be available natively for the upcoming round of ARM-based Windows laptops this summer.
“We have already ported Swift to work on Windows ARM64, which means the switch is feasible for us,” explains Abdulrasool. “It’s something we’re looking into, but it wasn’t an immediate priority because a lot of people don’t have access to this hardware yet.”
The Arc for Windows version now also syncs with Arc Search, the iOS app that previously only worked with Arc for macOS. The Browser Company is also developing an Android version of Arc Search, which will certainly help Arc feel even more cross-platform.
Arc for Windows is now available for download. Expect weekly changes as The Browser Company works toward parity between Windows and Mac.