Today, Arc released Max, a little AI spice added to the browser experience. Arc is already an amazing browser, but these new features put it firmly in the lead.
Arc was released by The Browser Company in April 2022. Currently, it's available for macOS and iOS. Windows is currently in the works. It won't be long before Arc is available on all platforms.
Arc is aggressively updated by its team. They currently release updates every week. The changes made are often based on user feedback, which is a great sign for the future of the browser. This update has been hyped up, and was live streamed on Youtube.
Arc Max
To activate Arc Max, all you have to do is search for max in the Arc command bar (⌘ + T)
Ask on Page
Hold down Command + F on any page to ask a question and let Max answer it for you in seconds.
Max piggybacks on the find (⌘ + F) feature to provide answers to your questions. This uses the contents of the page you are on in the AI query. You can find Ask on Page in the same place as find (top-right of screen).
If the page contains too much info it will partially-read the page. Possibly causing it to answer (even more) incorrectly. Also, this new feature makes the experience of using the find feature a little jarring. The keyboard shortcut says to hold down command + F, but you only have to press it to trigger the feature. I'm sure this will be fixed soon.
5-Second Previews
Press Shift and hover over any link to generate a summary of the webpage, without a single click.
This one will require more testing, but so far it seems to work well. It generates a preview of the link's contents and displays it in a small window. The contents take a few seconds to load in, leaving me wondering how useful this one will end up being.
Tidy Tab Titles
Have your tabs automatically renamed with tidier, shorter titles when you Pin them.
Pinning tabs isn't really my thing, but this feature still has its use. Arc generates a shorter title for pinned tabs. This is useful for tabs with long titles that get cut off, or instances where the title has nothing to do with the page contents.
Tidy Downloads
Keep your many files more organized with smartly renamed downloads — and make them a little easier to find later.
Very similar to Tidy Tab Titles. This feature smartly rename downloaded files. In instances where file names are long and unhelpful, this will replace the name with something related to the contents of the page where it was downloaded.
So far, this seems like the least helpful. I find that it renames files that already have helpful names (underscores are being replaced with spaces). I'm sure this will also be improved in the future.
ChatGPT in the Command Bar
Press ⌥⌘G, start typing, and get answers in fewer clicks.
My personal favorite in this update. Arc can now open a ChatGPT chat window in the command bar. This is now the fastest way to reach ChatGPT from any webpage in the browser.
No more half-baked Chrome extensions that add ChatGPT to websites. This will basically open ChatGPT with the prompt.
Windows: The Future
Arc has an ambitious plan for porting to Windows. The project is being done with Swift, which is a macOS language. Completing this project might mean more to the community than the browser itself. It would be a huge win for Swift, and possibly lead to more Swift projects on Windows.
Conclusion
This was a big day for Arc. No wonder they decided to make a whole production out of it. I feel that we'll see a new age of browsers when Arc hits Windows.