Arc Browser vs Google Chrome: Is It Worth The Switch?

we all use web browsers to access information every single day today I'm excited to share with you one that might revolutionize how we browse the web what's up friends Paul here and welcome to the Beautiful Mess where we talk about tools and tactics to improve your life today I'm excited to talk about this new web browser and let me tell you I've used many different browsers over my lifetime some include Internet Explorer may it rest in peace Opera Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Apple Safari Amazon silk Brave just to name a few I'm sure there could be others that I've downloaded and tested over my lifetime as a person that loves technology but those those just to give you an idea of some of the ones that I've tested but today I'm going to talk about one that I would say like is unique it kind of doesn't fall into the normal category of web browser that we're all used to I would say the majority of people typically use either Google Chrome Maybe the Microsoft Edge Mozilla Firefox and maybe maybe Safari those are probably the top for browsers right now however this new browser by the browser Company of New York yeah kind of setting off waves and we're going to dive into I and I decided to record this via video as well for those that want to watch this you can go to YouTube as well as Facebook Spotify those are the places that you can access the video because I'm doing a screen recording to kind of give you a glimpse of what it's like to use this browser and what makes it unique so for the full experience I encourage you to check it out on those platforms however I'll do my best to be as descriptive as possible so again this browser is called Arc it's newer to the game I believe it was first released to the public around April 19 2022 after I closed beta uh it's founded by Josh Miller and Hirsch agrawal I apologize if I butchered the name um but basically this one of the things that I love about this browser is actually the team behind it it's very humanized um and the people that are working on this project come from a wide variety of backgrounds that I think make this project just so unique compared to you know your typical browsers so that that's I think a little bit of background right now we're actually looking at Google Chrome so if you're wondering what this browser is up right now it's your typical Google Chrome I thought we'd start there keep you with a familiar just to get um you know an idea of what it looks you know what your typical browsing experience looks like before I show you the arc browser I first discovered Arc browser by a newsletter by Rich Webster basically he sent an email that he was testing out this browser and um that he had to wait to get get it and I was like what browser makes you wait to get it and so I had to figure out what was going on with this browser so I I joined the waiting list as well probably a couple weeks later I got access to it and let me show you to prove that I've been using this browser for a while I'll actually show you right now so this here is the browser a little bit different than probably what you're used to but if we go to here the credits basically they did something I think other companies do like where they you know people write their names inside of the you know the hardware different places to memorialize a moment in time and so Arc did this for version 1.0 and so it says Arc is a new way to use the internet brought to you by your friends at the browser company and by every member who tested it along the way so I won't scroll down this long list but if we search my name there I am right there um but yeah it's it's pretty amazing so full disclosure I tried this browser you know when I first got it I it didn't really stick with me at first I kind of went back to Google Chrome because one of the biggest differences that you'll notice right away now that we're looking at it is the sidebar there's no bar up here they did add this um kind of ability to have the web address right here which is it's nice to have that you can hide the sidebar it's a command s to hide it and so you have a very clean look for browsing the web which I think makes it a very unique product so you have basically different sections you have your PIN tabs at the top the unique thing about this is if I hover over it actually shows any upcoming events you can tell right now I don't have any up academic events um so that's why we're recording this right now it also works with Gmail they show you a little preview of your email which is really neat and then you can have like pin tabs and so these are some of the pin tabs that I have the way that it's organized first of all you have profiles similar to Chrome like you can have profiles I bet most of you don't use profiles on Chrome maybe a small percentage of you and then you have the ability to have spaces underneath that for each of those and that helps you keep the information very organized and clean that way you don't mix information and it just is a very good way of doing that and so down here you'll notice these are my different spaces so I can quickly change between them so if I'm in a different mode like for example I devoted one to just like my podcast I can quickly go there and it's got all of the different platforms that I need to quickly access like if I want to go to my show notes I can just click here and here are my notes for this episode and let me show you the peak mode this is really cool and it works in like email and certain web pages that will like if you need to just like take a look at a glimpse at a web page without opening up completely you just click on it and then you get this preview window that just pops up and you can either open it up completely with doing command o or you can close it with command W or clicking either of these buttons just a great way to like quickly see information without necessarily having to open up a new tab you know it's it's a little bit cleaner so that's kind of neat that gives you a quick idea of that so if we go here this is a browser company's website and you can tell you know just even in the design of their website they're just kind of poking fun at the typical browser experience and they want to make a difference with their browser which I love and so yeah I tried it and I stopped but then I tried it again and um I'm trying to see if I can replace Google Chrome with this there's there's been times where I'm just like so a little bit frustrated with the experience and I'll like I'll dive into some of my frustrations and things that I love about it so that you can make an informed decision whether this is something that you should try or not but first let's dive into the UI and ux experience the user experience and the user user interface Arc is beautiful like hands down this is probably the most beautiful browsing experience that I've ever experienced I mean it's just so clean the onboarding is this beautiful like it's just yeah you just have to try it for yourself honestly um but they they make it such a pleasure to work with I'd say that it's funny one of arc's biggest competitors and non-competitors is Google Chrome why do I say that it's because it is built using chromium as a base so there's this software called chromium which is like open source which people can use to make variations of basically Google Chrome so Google made chromium and people can use it to make other browsers so for example Microsoft Edge is a chromium based browser just in case you're curious and the unique thing about that is that for example you might have different extensions in Google Chrome and you can have those same exact extensions within the arc browser so all those extensions that you've come to love and know about you can use it within Arc as well which is great so like I said before you can preview you know your email basically you hover over and it says new unread messages you can exhale so that's just an example of what that looks like and so again these are the different spaces that you can click through I'm going to go back to the podcast one and it just makes it really easy to move between them another unique feature of this is that you can do what's called split view and I believe there's a shortcut I think it's Ctrl shift plus and yeah that is it and you can basically add a URL to the site right so you've got like a split view you can see both of them side by side which is really convenient that way you know if you're working on one thing and you need to reference something else like uh you're making notes just just super intuitive and and uh something that I think most people need when they're working on various projects and again you can just hide that sidebar and you've got a nice split view situation so the major organization I think that's that's an important thing to discuss real quick is like you have what's called your profiles so you'll notice here it says Paul and I can have a variety of them at one point I did have a work one but I also just thought that it was a little bit too much to have to have extensions like you have to have this is probably one of my frustrations you have to have extensions for each individual profile so consider that when you're adding them I would say less is more when it comes to that that way you don't have to add extension for each one like for example your password manager you don't have to add that to every single profile but maybe there's extensions that you only need for one of those profiles that might be a good use case of it and you can actually add more than one to the split view so I can add one more Oh I thought I could maybe maybe not let me see let me try this way there we go you can have more than um one in the split view you can have I think multiple in that split view but this is just and then if you want to change out of that you can to you can actually there's they've got a vertical version of it you can drag this uh to resize them so depending on how you want it arranged that might be something to consider you can separate all tabs so we're back to the individual tabs which is nice to be able to do that so you've got your profile set up then you make spaces and let me show you what that experience is like and this is going to show you kind of like the neatness about Arc in in the design aspect so we're going to come over here to this plus icon let's click new space and then we can name it um I'll just call this test space and you can create an icon for it so maybe we'll do a rocket because that's cool and then you can select the profile so here you could create a new profile what this does is it makes it so that they're truly separate so like if you're logged into certain accounts you can be logged only into those accounts on certain users so like if there's let's say you have Gmail accounts and you want to just have one Gmail account in a profile you can do that by having these separated out like it says no more flipping between work and personal accounts it just makes it a lot easier if you want to do that so you can name it I'm not going to do that right now but that is an option and then you can choose the theme I think this is a really cool thing is you can personalize it so that each space looks slightly different so let's say we want it to be a blue and you can move it around let's say I want maybe that as a blue and then they have these other parameters that you can set like you can make it a light blue a darker blue and then you can add like this noise which is kind of cool you can see it there it just adds this kind of distressed look to it let's add up just a little bit like that that's great and then you can have automatic appearance light appearance dark appearance this is what the dark appearance looks like light and then automatic so we'll just leave it like that we'll create a new space you'll notice already it pulled in these pinned tabs up here and so that is one thing to keep in mind with the profiles these pin tabs will stay with you but then I'm just going to go to google.com you can drag this up and this is also a way to pin tabs is right up here and then they have the tabs below so these tabs below you can easily clear them all so they're called today tabs and I believe after a day they just disappear no more holding on to like 20 different tabs and I think you can go back at least in your history you can probably go back and see you know if you needed to find a tab otherwise like if you're working on it and you need to save it I would suggest dragging it up here that way it's saved otherwise let's say we've got multiple tabs open let me see if I can create let's see um I guess why not I'll make multiple Google tabs just because we're going Google crazy okay so you've got these three Google tabs and then I'm going to hit clear and then you can see it got rid of two of them I didn't get rid of this one because I'm on it right now but if I go here and click clear they're all gone so it makes it a quick way to just like clear things out if you're done with like a project or done with whatever you're working on just to clean things up and start fresh I love that and so just to compare this with what it looks like within Chrome let's open back Chrome up so in Chrome what you can do is you can make new groups so we're going to do this test group and so it's it's somewhat similar to what I would say the space the spaces are to some degree but I just don't think it's quite as separating the experience you know because you can still see all the other tabs whereas in Arc you really when you're in a space like it that's all you see is that one space which I feel like can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you're working on maybe there's like things that you have to reference between the two and it just like gets a little bit frustrating um that that probably is one of my frustrations is like needing to jump between um elements like that but you know there's workarounds you can create a new arc window but it it does get a little confusing because you know you might have a page loaded in one window and then you open a new one and then it reloads that page and so it's a completely different experience so something to keep in mind and then let me show you something that's really unique that you probably have never seen in any browser before and that is called boost so if you right click on on the tab you can boost this site and what that does let me bring this in view is it allows you to customize each page and I really haven't personally done this much but I I tested it today just like show you and it is kind of cool so just like the the browser experience you can customize the way it looks so let's say we also want it to be oh let's let's go crazy let's let's make it like a a pink and then they allow you to invert the lightness so you can go into a dark mode just like that they allow you to change the size so we can make it just ridiculous you can change the case so make them all caps lowercase whatever meets your fancy you can change the font so let's say I don't know if they have comic oh look at that look at that you can do that like Old English kind of vibe so yeah you can make you can make it your own and they actually have a video about like making this feature it's like nobody ask for this this is totally not normal and that's kind of what makes them so unique you can adjust the contrast and brightness saturation it's just amazing uh what you can do and then okay this is really cool you can zap things so let's say I don't want to see the Google logo I just want to see the search bar I can do that I don't want to see I'm feeling lucky I'm not feeling lucky um I don't want to see the try the AI powered overviews and look at that it's so much cleaner I don't need to see store I don't need to see about um I don't need to see images I don't need to see this icon and then all of a sudden um your experience is so much cleaner so I think that that's like one of the unique things about this is that you can quickly change your experience to make it unique make it your own I can imagine things like YouTube Facebook if you wanted to go in there and just like clean up your experience make it your own you can do that and you can even share it with other people you can even inject code you can change the CSS if you're if that meets your fancy um you can inject JavaScript but due to security reasons you can't share it but that's you know I don't know who would be sharing something with JavaScript who knows maybe there's somebody out there but yeah and then you can reverse convert back to the normal View and you can delete this boost you can Shuffle it so it's just like random wow that's crazy [Music] um that's not bad just gives you an idea of what what's possible with this boost feature um we'll go back to normal just shows you what's possible now let's quickly dive into my biggest frustrations my biggest frustrations is that I am used to 100 experiencing browsing this way where the tabs are on top and I can quickly move them around if I need to I can quickly add a tab I can pull it out you can do that with uh Arc but it's it's just not the same experience and so that that's like one of the things that I will say like I get frustrated by because I'm just so used to having tabs up here easily move them around adjust them it's a little bit different within here obviously I can drag this tab and move it to let's say the podcast space and they also have the shortcuts you can see there the I think that's shift eight I always get confused about those icons so yeah that shows you kind of how this all works and then again the other frustration is just having to install extensions on each profile so if you plan to use profiles just keep that in mind until they come up with a universal option or ability to save them to certain uh profiles it might be a little tedious setting that up for each profile especially you know think about your password manager you probably want that in each of the browsers my other frustration is little Arc so basically this happens when I open up a link from like my email client just in case you're curious I'm testing out this email client called Spark It's been a fun experience like it's it's a very unique email experience so if you're interested in checking that out I'll leave a link in the description it's kind of like that preview window and the problem is is that if you click another link sometimes it replace basically I think it replaces it and so it's sometimes hard to find that I'm sure they'll address this in the future updates because you know obviously this is a brand new browser not much history and they are trying things out they're testing things I will say that you know one of the unique things is they're not afraid of admitting that they were wrong about a change um I think one of the things that they made was like the today links would not sync to a new window and I think this was actually a requested feature and then they backtracked on it because people realized that actually it was better the other way so they're not afraid you know going back and making changes to make things better which I love but overall my thoughts are I love the vibe of the browser it's very unique it's a very fresh experience um and I think with the Innovative team that's in place it could really revolutionize the browsing experience if you're on the fence to give it a try I'd say go for it give it a try see if this might be the browser that you've been missing that you've been looking for again I'll drop links in the description so you can check it out but yeah just like the onboard experience whenever you have to have an update it's really cool oh one last thing but wait there's more they have what's called easels and notes and so this is really cool so you can just click new easel and it brings up base basically this like little whiteboard and you can just like change it up you can add an image text circles change the color of that um add a rectangle add text and then you can quickly share it with anyone so anyone can view anyone can edit and then you've got a link that you can copy and send to somebody else which is fantastic and then you have notes as well so you can click new note this is my awesome take note okay and then you can again go share anyone can view copy link send it to somebody so just a quick way if you want to jot down ideas record ideas you know it might be a good way to do that let me know your thoughts have you tried Arc out are you thinking about testing it out I think it's a unique browsing experience if you're used to Google Chrome Firefox Microsoft Edge and you're looking for something slightly different this might be the answer um I'm not sure if I'll end up sticking with it long term but right now I enjoy testing it out it's been a fun experience again probably the hardest thing to get used to is not having tabs on the top just keep that in mind if that's what you're used to might take a little while to get um acclimated to the new setup well friends I hope you enjoyed this episode if you did Smash that like button and subscribe or follow wherever you're listening um right right if you're on Apple podcasts or you're on Spotify we'd love to get your input and uh drop a comment if you've made it this far what browser you're currently using and why and until next time my friends stay messy [Music] yourself

Channel: The Beautiful Mess – Paul Dittus

Views: 33,059

Keywords: the beautiful mess, podcast, episode, productivity, productivity tips, arc vs google chrome, web browsers, internet explorer, opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Amazon Silk, Brave, ARC browser, browser company, Google Chrome comparison, google chrome vs arc, chrome vs arc, arc, arc browser, arc browser review, arc browser tutorial, arc browser customization, arc browser easel, arc browser notes, arc web browser review

Id: _LK1LqBKW3I

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023