The Most Powerful and Unusual Feature in the New “Arc” Browser

“Easel” lets you make your own custom dashboard of the web

Recently I got a chance to try out the new “Arc” browser, made by The Browser Company. (It’s Mac-only right now, alas, but if that’s your OS you can get on the waiting list here.)

Right out of the box, I quite liked it — because it’s designed for power users who open a ton of tabs. (Indeed, one of the browser’s designers, Nate Parrott, openly said “I wanted to encourage tab-hoarding behavior”, which greatly warmed my heart. <Signed, someone with 87 tabs currently open>)

So there are a bunch of features I noticed right away that are superb. It has “vertical” tabs, which, as I’ve written before, are terrific because they free up vertical space, making it easier to read web pages. Indeed, Arc even tucks its URL bar off in the top left corner, so there’s even more up-and-down reading space; a bold and smart move.

Plus, there are oodles of cool features for managing your tabs, all clustered in the far left-hand column of the browser. You can pin your most-often-used tabs at the top of the column so they’re always there, making it kind of like a mini home-screen on your phone…