The Browser Company is building another browser, and it’s not called Arc.

Cease me if this sounds acquainted: The Browser Firm is constructing a browser that it thinks could make your web life slightly extra organized, slightly extra helpful, and perhaps even slightly extra pleasant. It has new ideas about tabs, and what your browser can do in your behalf.

I’ve heard this story earlier than! However the browser that Browser Firm CEO Josh Miller needs to speak about when he calls me on Thursday isn’t Arc, the product he and his workforce have been engaged on for the final 5 years. It’s not Arc 2.0, both, despite the fact that Miller has been talking publicly about Arc 2.0 for some time now. It’s a wholly new browser. And for Miller and The Browser Firm, it’s an opportunity to get again to constructing the way forward for browsers they got down to create within the first place.

A wierd factor has occurred over the past couple of years, Miller says. Arc has grown quick — customers quadrupled this yr alone — but it surely has additionally turn into clear that Arc isn’t going to be a really mainstream product. It’s too sophisticated, too totally different, too arduous to get into. “It’s simply an excessive amount of novelty and alter,” Miller says, “to get to the variety of folks we actually wish to get to.” Consumer interviews and knowledge have satisfied the corporate that it is a power-user device, and at all times will probably be.

Alternatively, the individuals who use Arc have a tendency to like Arc. They love the sidebar, they love having areas and profiles, they love all of the customization choices. Usually talking, these customers have additionally settled into Arc — Miller says they don’t need new options as a lot as they only need their browser to be sooner, smoother, safer. And honest sufficient!

So The Browser Firm confronted a scenario many corporations encounter: they’d a popular product that was by no means going to be a game-changer. Slightly than attempt to construct the following factor into the present factor, and danger each alienating the individuals who prefer it and by no means reaching the individuals who don’t, the corporate determined to only construct one thing new.

Arc will not be dying, Miller says. He says that time and again, the truth is, even after I inform him the YouTube video the corporate simply launched sounds just like the factor corporations say proper earlier than they kill a product. It’s simply that Arc received’t change a lot anymore. It’ll get stability updates and bug fixes, and there’s a workforce at The Browser Firm devoted to these. “In that sense,” Miller says, “it looks like a complete-ish product.” A lot of the workforce’s vitality and time will now be devoted to ranging from scratch.

“Arc was mainly this front-end, tab administration innovation,” Miller says. “Individuals beloved it. It grew like a weed. Then it began getting sluggish and began crashing quite a bit, and we felt unhealthy, and we needed to learn to make it quick. And we sort of misplaced sight, in some methods, of the truth that we’ve acquired to do the working system half.”

The plan this time is to construct not only a totally different interface for a browser, however a special sort of browser fully — one that’s rather more proactive, extra highly effective, extra AI-centric, extra consistent with that unique imaginative and prescient. Name it the iPhone of internet browsers, or the “web pc,” or no matter different metaphor you want. The thought is to show the browser into an app platform. Miller nonetheless needs to do it, and he needs to do it for everybody.

What does that seem like? Miller is a bit obscure on the main points. The brand new browser, which Miller intimates may launch as quickly as the start of subsequent yr, is designed to come back with no switching prices, which suggests amongst different issues that it’s going to have horizontal tabs and fewer concepts about group. The thought is to “make the primary 90 seconds easy” as a way to get extra folks to change. After which, slowly, to disclose what this new browser can do.

Miller has a few favourite examples of how a browser may provide help to get stuff performed, which he’s mentioned to me, on Decoder, and elsewhere in current months. There’s the trainer who spends hours copying and pasting knowledge between enterprise apps; the Shopify sellers who spend an excessive amount of time trying up order numbers after which pasting them into customer-support emails. These are the types of issues {that a} browser, with entry to all of your internet apps and searching knowledge, may start to do in your behalf. And with AI instruments like the new “Computer use” feature from Anthropic, that sort of factor is starting to turn into automated and attainable.

Designing a browser that’s each accessible to everybody and a totally new factor received’t be straightforward. The Browser Firm tried it as soon as already, and ended up right here. However Miller feels good about having constructed a superb browser over the past 5 years. Now it’s time to get again to the true job.