Transcription

For many years now, browsers have been mostly the same. That didn't used to be the case. I remember when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was terrible and Google Chrome came around and blew it out of the water. But that's over a decade ago. These days, browsers feel very similar. They have similar features, they're about equally fast, and they're all easy to use. In the past few years, I've often switched between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and hardly noticed the difference. Until now. A few weeks ago, a friend told me about a new browser called Arc. Arc makes a very big promise. It's going to completely change the way that I use the internet. You can imagine that I was a little bit skeptical when I heard that at first, but hey, this is a good friend of mine, and I like to listen to his suggestions. So I downloaded Arc and started to play around with it. Now, the first thing I noticed is that Arc is extremely easy to get started with. It allowed me to import data from Google Chrome, another browser that I've been using, and I was immediately, magically already logged on to all my favorite websites. And even extensions like the 1Password password manager that I have as an extension in my browser was already set up and fully functional. Super smooth transition and a great first impression. But hey, making it easy to switch to a new browser is a good start, but not enough to get people to stick with that new browser. So what makes Arc different? Well, it has one standout feature called Spaces. Spaces live in the left sidebar in Arc, and they are essentially collections of tabs. They're pin tabs that live at the top. Those are tabs that you're gonna be referring to all the time, websites that you open very frequently. You can think of them as your bookmarks from other older browser concepts. Then below that are temporary tabs, tabs that you're going to use and then be done with and close at some point. You can have different spaces for, for example, your personal life and your work life, or you can have different spaces for specific projects. For example, right now I'm rehabbing a shoulder injury. And so I often refer back to certain YouTube videos and certain PDF documents I found on the internet with guidelines on how to do certain exercises. And rather than storing those videos in a note or downloading those PDFs, I can just have browser tabs open in a neat little space of its own, very handy. There are also favorite tabs and those live at the top and those travel with you as you go through different spaces. Now a really useful feature is that in each space you can be logged onto a different so-called user profile. You may have not have used user profiles in the past. Essentially what that is, is you can be locked onto the same websites with different accounts in one space versus the other. So you can be logged into your personal Gmail in one space. And then when you switch to the other space, you're logged into your work Gmail. That can be a really great way of making sure that you don't accidentally post things from the wrong account. Now there's another couple of neat little features in the tab management in Arc. For example, you can rename tabs. This is such a nice little feature that I would love to see in other browsers as well. Because sometimes I have a tab open for quite a while and it can be really handy to remind myself, oh, this is what this tab is about. So the main feature is spaces, but there's some other features that are really helpful as well. Arc makes really good use of space. Most screens have more horizontal space than vertical space. Unless you're one of those weirdos who gets one of those screens and then sort of rotates it around and puts it next to you. All right, fine, I'll accept it. But most of the time, we have more horizontal space on our screens. And Arc does its tab management in the spaces on the left. So you have much more space in the vertical direction, which is also the way that we scroll through websites. So hey, it's easier to read stuff. Now on top of that, Arc has a really nice full screen mode. If you use the keyboard shortcut Command S, you'll get full screen and you'll be just be looking at the website, no tab management or anything like that. And that can be handy, especially on slightly smaller screens like right here on my MacBook. Arc also has a couple of other features that are really handy, like Split View. It allows you to put two tabs right next to each other. Amazing. It's something that I never realized that I wanted inside my browser. Of course, I can always create two browser windows, but the way that you set up Split View in Arc, it's just much easier than it works in other browsers. Now on top of that, there's a couple of neat little features that create small Arc windows that are really nice. And one of these is called Peak. If you're in one of your pinned tabs, one of the tabs that are always around and you click on a link, by default, it will pop up as an overlay. So a new tab will open as an overlay that you can quickly look at and then decide if you want to make it a full blown tab or if you just wanna quickly do something and then close it. For example, if I'm in my email app and then I wanna unsubscribe from an email, I click the unsubscribe link and it just pops up as an overlay. And it says, hey, you unsubscribed, this is confirmed. And then I can close the overlay and I don't end up with a whole separate tab for it. That's really nice. Arc also has a picture-in-picture mode for video. That's really great. So let's say I'm watching a YouTube video by famous YouTuber, Peter Uggies, and I switch away and I start doing something in a different app, but I'm still listening and I still kind of wanna watch. By default, automatically the picture-in-picture mode will travel with me to my other desktop. And you can resize that picture-in-picture. You can pause the video there. And there's a nice little button for going back to the original tab that was playing in. Super handy if you're often watching videos while you're doing something else on your computer as well. And finally, there's a feature called Little Arc that I really, really like. So Little Arc is a very tiny browser window that just shows you a webpage without anything else. And this will open by default if you're in a different app on your computer and you click on a link. By default, it will open in Little Arc and often that's enough to just read the article that someone sent you. But if you decided it needs to become its own tab in a proper space, you just type command O and it'll open up into the main Arc window. These are little features, but together they make browsing the internet a lot nicer. And really that's what Arc is all about. It promises to be this operating system for the internet that changes the way that you use the internet. And it's pretty good at that. There's a few other features that I really like. One of them is that inside your spaces, you can organize your tabs into folders. So if you have a very intricate bookmarking system and you often have to refer back to things that you stored over the years, you can really create wonderful organization inside of each space. And again, this can be separate for your personal and your workspaces. If you hit command T or command L, you get the command bar, which is where you can search for stuff, where you can open new tabs, but you can also search for an existing tab. So if you're one of those people that often has many, many, many tabs open, you can just search for whatever tab you have. And among all your 45 tabs, it'll quickly come up and you can switch to it. You can also use a sort of quick search feature. So for example, if you start typing maps and then hit tab, you can instantly perform a search inside Google Maps. Then you type your search phrase and it will open Google Maps with that search phrase already gone, saving you just a little bit of time. It's also good to know that Arc runs on Google Chromium, the same engine that powers Google Chrome, which means that everything works. Websites will not have any problems displaying because most websites these days are tested most heavily on Google Chrome. So rest assured, the internet is gonna be super smooth for you. Arc does have some features that I haven't found a use for this yet. For example, there is a notes feature inside Arc. So you can write up some notes. Now, I don't know why they put this in a browser because I just use a separate notes app that is much more fully featured. So it feels like reinventing the wheel, but perhaps this is useful for some people. Then there is a feature called Easel, where you can take screenshots of websites and put them on a kind of pin board. It's basically Pinterest, except for websites that you visit. Then there's a feature called Boost, which is maybe cool for software developers, but really not useful for the general public. It lets you modify things about websites. So for example, you can modify the font on newyorktimes.com. I don't know why you'd want to do something like that. That seems like a very niche use case, and I'd rather that the Arc team focus on features that are handy for a really wide group of people rather than for just software developers who like to tinker with stuff. Maybe make that an extension or something. Arc also has a feature called Auto Archive. Now, this may be great for you, but personally, I don't like it. What Arc does is by default on a set schedule, it will archive all of your non-pinned tabs. So let's say you open a bunch of tabs, you're reading a bunch of articles by default, like every 12 hours or so, Arc will just close all those tabs. Now, closed tabs in Arc don't live in something called history. They live in something called the archive, and that's nice. It's really easy to find, easy to browse. You can find all the stuff you were looking at, but I'm pretty good with my tab management. I don't tend to leave tabs open when I don't use them. So for me, closing my tabs probably just means that, hey, I was not done with that tab yet. But if you're the kind of person who has dozens and dozens of tabs open all the time and you're not using most of them, you might appreciate this auto-archive feature. Not all of Arc's features are new, but Arc does tend to just do them better. For example, Google Chrome has tab groups, allowing you to keep tabs that are related to each other together. But Arc's use of spaces is a much more sophisticated and yet easier way of doing this. Firefox also has picture-in-picture, but the interface is clunkier. And many browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari allow you to pin tabs, but again, it's just easier to pin tabs and keep track of them in Arc. So who is the Arc browser for? If you tend to have dozens and dozens of tabs open, if you tend to have a bunch of tabs that you go to all the time, if you use your browser as a project workspace, where you have sets of tabs open for specific work projects, study projects, or personal projects, Arc might be super handy for you. It might be exactly what you need. If you spend a lot of time just living on the internet, hey, you should give Arc a try. I hope this was a helpful overview for you. I'd love to hear what you think Arc could help you with. So why don't you let me know in the comments and share your suggestion and insights with everybody else. Thanks so much for watching. Have a great day. See you in the next video. Ciao. Videos and certain PDF documents I found on the internet with guidelines on how to do certain exercises. And rather than storing those videos in a note or downloading those PDFs, I can just have browser tabs open in a neat little space of its own. Very handy. There are also favorite tabs and those live at the top and those travel with you as you go through different spaces. Now I really have not have used user profiles in the past. Essentially what that is, is you could.