Arc Browser Act 2 (concerns)

2024-02-03

Not sure at all about the “Act 2” of Arc Browser as announced in “Meet Act II of Arc Browser - A browser that browses for you” on February 1st, 2024.

  • I’m disappointed that the company seems to be going down the AI rabbit hole, but strangely under the false guise of freedom from search engines and advertising. They present a classic “take out the middleman” disrupter energy that startups love to inhabit, as if they’ve revolutionized and/or democratized some core evil thing. I’m in agreement with them that Big Search™ is not good, and that Google has a monopoly on search. But AI as the answer is just… not it.
  • Instant Links kind of just seems like Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” with a few extra fancy language parsing features
  • Live Folders could be interesting, but it does seem like we just keep re-inventing RSS, but with weirder proprietary systems. Because this is just RSS, right?
  • Arc Explore / Search - some pretty big red flags for me.
  • Yes, searching for recipes and getting listicles and pages with lots of ads sucks. Capitalism sucks and that part of the web is broken because of bad incentives. Anyway, the answer to me is not to build “a new category of software” which is basically just doing a google search and then summarizing the first few web pages. The whole slick thing of “follow the money” and “we’re pulling the internet into the future” doesn’t add up. For one, the actual engineering of the core of Arc is still built on Chromium — instead of actually delivering competition to Google’s iron grasp on the web browser. (I get that Chromium is open source, but it’s still primarily a Google thing.) So the stuff about how bad Google is kind of rings false. Moreover, I do not trust LLMs to do the very important job of curation, which is so much of what the internet has moved away from with the algorithmic feed. RSS, bookmarking, blogs, forums… they aren’t perfect, we don’t want just nostalgia, but I’m not convinced at all that a browser that “browses for you” is the way forward.
  • The AI making the web page thing is strange, and the workflow they presented of trying to cook a dish felt incredibly contrived. AI has no sense of context or taste; does it know what a good cookbook looks like? Where’s the joy of browsing?
  • Calling this a new category of software also just seems… goofy. Framing it as some historically revisionist march towards rebellious justice rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a lot of hype hype hype for what amounts to a web browser with AI features. (Weirdly there’s prominently a Bernie sticker in the diner window behind Josh’s head; what was the curious decision making behind leaving that in? A socialist web browser this is not.)
  • And this is all with ignoring the most obvious problem to the AI search thing, which is the same as most all non-personal LLM things: what about attribution? What about copyright and credit? So the AI just steals a bunch of work and gives it to you? There’s a major ethical gray area that they kind of seem willfully oblivious to? I didn’t see anything presented that alleviated any concerns around that. Having tried the Arc Search iPhone app I’m left with more questions than answers.
  • That being said — I was an Arc early adopter and have liked some of what Arc has done (though to be honest I’ve grown more weary of the sidebar as good UX). More web browsers is good, we need more diversity! I’m just worried about the direction they’re taking with putting all their chips on AI. Some of their ideas they started out with (Easels, for instance) seemed more promising to me.
  • ”A Browser that browses for you” is probably not going to be good for privacy.