I love Arc on my mac. I know it's not for everyone, but it does so many things right (for me) that going back to another browser is a major impediment to my workflows.
For me it's the first browser that has made proper tab management stick. I have way too many tabs, in the middle of the day I often have 40+ per window. The combination of pinned tabs, tab renaming, folders, auto-expiry, sync, and spaces, just works well. They have in my opinion perfectly developed the spectrum from ephemeral pages you need once to pinned pages you always have open, with many levels of granularity along that spectrum.
The rest of the browser, not for me. They have a whiteboarding feature, not sure why a browser needs that. They have AI now because of course they do.
I enjoy using it at home. The day they decide to charge $20 a month because of the AI features is the day I switch back to Chrome.
I don't understand those who have 40+ Tabs open. Whats so important about them, are they StackOverflow, Github pages?
I'm not trying to diss. I get it if you use WebUi of messenger services and maybe stats but can't think what-else it would be. I'd rather open a new browser window for those important services.
Myself gets overwhelmed when I have more than five. I use the bookmark bar more than tabs but an excessive amount of tabs?
I would see it as a form of data hoarding...
I close all tabs when I finish work daily. As the same that I move all emails in to a week ending folder ensuring that I have a clean mailbox for the following Monday.
Right now I've got email, todolist, 3 docs, 2x HN tabs, 6 bugs that I've been working on today, 5 experiment reports that I've been investigating, ~10 iterations of build results as I've been working through fixing a bug.
Do I need all of these? No. But figuring out which I don't need is more work so some will just accumulate for a while and once every few days I close everything.
Arc does a good job of expiring old tabs and also of letting me bump the priority of a tab in various ways.
It is for the same reason people prefer to sleep or hibernate there PCs instead of shutting them down. You don't want any breaks in your flow. Closing tabs and opening them again from bookmarks is annoying.
I keep tabs like production and development Firebase console, Github, Gmail, Trello, Slack, Google Cloud logs, documents/spreadsheets, Google searches, documentation/articles for features/bugs etc.
It makes my work faster since I everything I need is always available in the tab bar. Feature/bug related tabs are closed only when they are fully done and deployed to Production.
It helps to not just think of them as open tabs - personally I'd be overwhelmed with 40+ tabs as well, and that's exactly why a traditional browser frustrates me.
Think of them more as a combination tab/bookmark. Then tabs that are opened that aren't "bookmarked/pinned" are in a separate area; you can even set those to automatically close at the end of the day if you want
Do you use split tabs at all? I've found hiding the side pane and having multiple split tabs open in one window is a lot great when I'm trying to focus on work. Also not something totally new, but I use their Boosts feature a lot more than I expected, it's great to quickly "zap" elements from websites that I frequent.
Getting used to Arc's keyboard shortcuts and command palette has made it pretty indispensable in my work flow.
Only tried split tabs briefly, the UX didn't feel great to me. I might not be the target market here though as I tend to have a lot of tabs and navigate between them with keyboard shortcuts very quickly. I also prefer to just use the OS windowing for things that split tabs would be useful for.
My browser at work (Chrome) manages it performance wise with no issues. It's only a UI issue. I've tried plugins for vertical tab management and never found one I've liked for any of Chrome/Safari/Firefox. I've also tried built-in tab grouping in several browsers and also never managed to make one stick. They're often too inflexible I think.
Reducing the number of tabs is a good solution, but browsers don't tend to have features for this. Arc does, and I rely on its tab archiving which I think is pretty good.
