Introducing Arc

Make New Tabs…

…but keep the old ones. One is archived and the other is pinned.

It’s so easy to make a new tab, jump to an existing tab, reopen an archived tab, search the Internet, or even search on a particular website like YouTube or Amazon. All of these actions take place in the Command Bar. Click New Tab or press Command+T to get there.

Minimalism

I love the way Arc moves tabs to the side, reduces the toolbar to a single line, and attempts to maximize the user’s view of webpage content. I was already familiar with side-based tabs as that was the design of OmniWeb, my primary browser a decade ago, but this one really tries to make content the main thing to see from top to bottom.

Arc takes the tab approach up a notch, too, by separating pinned and favorite websites from others, merging bookmarks with tabs, and moving away from history and toward an archive of visited websites. Unpinned tabs are automatically archived after a set period of time, similar to Safari on iPhone and iPad.

Spaces & Profiles

Chrome and soon Safari offer the ability to segregate web-based accounts in separate profiles. This function provides a user a separate window or set of windows with different bookmarks, history, and settings. In those browsers, one must fully switch profiles, which cannot run concurrently among windows on the screen.

Arc builds upon this concept and offers spaces, too. Spaces operate in a single window and can hold separate sets of pinned and other tabs, while Profiles can span spaces.

As a result, I can have a bunch of tabs remain open with personal websites, a separate bunch for work sites, and any other groups I like, all while maintaining a single window on the screen. This makes Arc great for students to organize all the websites for their respective classes.

Arc also elegantly prevents accounts from interfering with each other by offering to restrict them to specific spaces. Suppose I have Google accounts for each of multiple domains of my life. I can tell Arc to only access a specific Google account in a given space.

And There’s More

Recently, I discovered Raindrop.io, an app for bookmarking webpages and syncing across devices. With Pocket, now owned by Firefox, dropping its dedicated app, Raindrop.io seemed to come at an opportune time.

However, Arc has my attention for keeping tabs in sync between my Macs via iCloud. This way, I can always browse the same set of websites no matter which device I’m on, no special plugins required. [Update: As of February 2024, Arc now provides its own syncing capability, no longer relying on iCloud.]

An added benefit is Little Arc, a windowed version of the New Tab panel that you can call up anywhere on your Mac. Enter a URL or search query and show a website in a smaller window that opens in front of the current application. This can prevent confusion with tabs in a particular space and also makes browsing more accessible, even in full screen apps.

And then there’s Peek. When you click a link that points to a different site, it can load in an embedded window on top of the current one. You can easily close the Peek window when done and return to what you were doing.

From both Little Arc and Peek, you can convert the window to a regular tab in a chosen space.