Would Somebody Please Just Build This Browser

For a year or two, my browser of choice was Arc. Arc was a relatively new entrant by The Browser Company of New York. More than just a lot of good ideas, it had good taste. Somebody actually told me about it while on a call, completely unprompted. It was that good. I don’t know the whole story behind why The Browser Company decided to stop working on it and are now building a new, maybe-a-browser that is really just AI chatbot? It’s unclear. Whatever the reason, I find it baffling and unfortunate that Arc has been relegated to maintenance mode.

It’s true that for all of its polish and creativity, Arc did have some unresolved UX issues: the way “Little Arc” worked, opening a new tab didn’t actually open a new tab, the squished address bar, the distracting UI animation whenever I selected or deselected text. And I still ended up with a lot of tabs, workspaces, folders, that once created tended to fossilize. Cleaning it all up was a chore that I didn’t have any interest in doing.

I ended up switching to Vivaldi, and with a lot of customizing, I managed created an Arc-like experience that works ok. But I still end up with a long list of tabs in the sidebar - even though there’s a clear hierarchy and grouping of which tabs go together. It also doesn’t look great, and they’re pushing some VPN now.

Even though generating lots of slop output is what most people seem to be using LLMs for, one of the most valuable uses for them is in summarization and categorizing. Based on my own testing, they’re now totally up to the task of categorizing tabs, as well as renaming them so that the bit you see in the sidebar is relevant. Like in the above mockup.

I don’t need an AI chatbot in my browser. I don’t need my browser to be Completely Rethought. I don’t need a VPN, or some cryptocurrency, or a Downloads manager (I already have Finder), or my browser disallowing me from using uBlock Origin. But my browser automatically keeping my tabs organized for me, that lets me rearrange and close all tabs from a single topic? Yes please.

Why doesn’t this exist as a browser yet? Is it cost? Is it privacy? Both could be resolved by only sending the title, time opened, and domain for each tab to the LLM and telling it to be an expert tab organizer. Whatever the problem is, I think they’re solvable (e.g. local, on-device processing) and a browser like this, that automatically organized your tabs for you, would be a massive success. Please build it.

…and if you are working on it, let me know.