There are plenty of great web browsers for Windows out there. and while they all differ in terms of specific features and design elements, it's fair to say that many of them share a lot of elements. If you start using a new browser, you may have to adapt to a couple of things, but overall, you can get up to speed with no issue.

The Browser Company, the entity behind the new Arc browser, wanted to change the expectations for what a browser looks and feels like. But does changing all the conventions of a browser really make sense? I went hands-on with the browser for a couple of days, and frankly, I came away more frustrated than anything. But it's not all bad.

It's still a browser

And it's still Chromium, too

Before I get into any of the fun and weird quirks of Arc, it should be established that it's still a web browser that works much like others. It's also based on Chromium, so the company isn't trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the core foundation of a browser and how pages load and render. It's actually kind of interesting, since in my experience, it feels like the biggest problem people have with the browser market is the over-reliance on Chromium (Firefox is the only notable browser with its own engine). Still, building a new engine is no easy feat and it's really not necessary, so this is fine.

It also has a lot of the features you'd expect, like support for tabs and any Chrome extension you have. It's not a complete break from what you're using, and it also does a good job importing your existing browsing history and bookmarks.

The good

The UI is nice and compact

Right off the bat, one thing I like about Arc is that the UI really strives to be extra compact. Instead of having a tab bar at the top, tabs are shown in a vertical bar on the left, and while it takes up a chunk of space, you can make it so that it's hidden until you mouse over the edge of the window, so it gives you plenty of space to just look at the webpage you're viewing. I actually like this, and while it takes a little longer to get to my tabs now, I got used to this pretty quickly and enjoyed using it.

In addition to removing the tab bar, Arc also compresses a lot of UI menu elements to save space. The URL bar is replaced by a simple title showing the current domain you're on, and along that bar, you get all your options in tiny buttons. On the left, the browser's menu along with the toggle to show the sidebar, plus back, forward, and refresh buttons. A button for your downloads also appears here if you've downloaded files. On the right, you get the usual menu buttons plus a split view button, so you can see two or more pages side by side.

In the center, in addition to the URL, you get a button to immediately copy the current page URL, and another for accessing your extensions and some other actions. I actually like how easy it is to copy the URL this way, even if it took some getting used to.

Does this mean I prefer this to the usual way of doing it? Not really, but this isn't a terrible change in my opinion. It's more so a matter of preference. Though if you have that preference, Microsoft Edge already has an option for vertical tabs, while still allowing horizontal tabs if you prefer that.

Split view is helpful and easy to use

Another thing I quite like about Arc is how easy it is to view multiple pages side by side. I do this a lot when doing some management work, and Arc makes it fairly easy to split a window to show two pages at once. Just click the split view button, choose whether the new page should on the left or right of the current one, and you're good to go.

What's interesting is that Arc actually moves most of the buttons, like back, forward, refresh, and other down to the tab level when you do this. That means your pages have separate buttons for these actions, which is actually very helpful. It's really easy in a browser like Vivaldi to click the refresh button in a window, only to reload the wrong page in a split view since the buttons are all shared. Here, you don't have to worry about which tab is active, just click the button that applies to the page you're viewing.

Some other browsers have split view options, and Arc is somewhere in the middle in terms of its implementation. Microsoft Edge has a split view, but it only works with two pages, while Arc lets you keep adding more. However, the only option you have is to split the screen vertically, so if you add a lot of tabs, you end up with a ton of very thin columns. Vivaldi also has a split view mode, and it automatically splits vertically and horizontally to make better use of space.

The weird

Tab management is a mixed bag

Tab management is probably the most radical change Arc brings to the table, and it's a bit of a mixed bag. There are some aspects I like. Arc lets you create multiple spaces, so you can group tabs based on whether they're work related or not, for example, and move between them more easily. Other browsers have sort of similar features, like workspaces, but I'd say Arc probably does make it feel a bit more natural, with each space being shown as a page on the tab bar, so you can easily switch between them.

Pinned tabs take a very prominent role at the top of the tab bar, and it's also fairly interesting. Gmail and Google Calendar are pinned by default (for some reason), and you can also pin anything you want to it, including split views. I like this part a lot. Split views don't show an icon, which looks odd, but it's nice to be able to access them so quickly. In a browser like Vivaldi, I can pin tabs and tile them, but while tabs are remembered, the tiling layout isn't, so I have to set it up again. This works better.

But the real big change for me is how Arc handles tabs across different windows. Basically, every tab you have open is shown in every window. I think this has a benefit in that it makes it really easy to see any page on either browser window at a moment's notice. If I open a new tab and I suddenly want to check something on my previous tab without closing the new one, I can just use the other window to view that tab.

However, this doesn't really work the way you might think it does. The tab isn't loaded and ready to display on each window, Arc just remembers the URL so you can visit it again. So, if you click a tab in a window where it wasn't opened, it will just load that website again, and in pages where content updates frequently, that means you might be in a very different place. Arc also doesn't unload the tab from the first window, so you now have two tabs show under the same banner in different windows, but they can end up displaying completely different things. It's weird.

The bad

Bookmarks are tabs

It's not all positive, though. In changing the way tabs work, Arc also treats your bookmarks as tabs. When I set up my Arc browser, I brought over all my data from Vivaldi, and what that means is that all my bookmarks from that browser become pinned tabs in your primary browser profile. If your bookmarks are in folders, they're all still displayed inside those folders and you can navigate them, so feel like bookmarks.

But they're still tabs, and it's confusing. When you open a website from your "bookmarks", it doesn't open a new tab. It just highlights that page in your bookmarks. If you only have one or two bookmarked pages, that's probably fine, but when you have dozens across different folders, the folder structure now takes up most of the tab view. You collapse the folder view and see just the open tab, but it's just strange to see these two concepts merged together like this, and I don't think it works that well.

Bookmarklets don't work

Because of this change in behavior for bookmarks, Arc also outright breaks "bookmarklets". If you're not familiar, there are some web tools that can be added to your browser as bookmarks, but they're not a page per se, and rather, they use javascript to take action on the current page. For example, this GitHub code summons Google Translate to translate whatever page you're currently viewing.

But since bookmarks are treated as tabs here, they can't tke actions on any page. Clicking one of these bookmarks does nothing, and it makes this browser immediately less useful.

Arc doesn't really add anything

The overarching problem with Arc is that it feels like it changed a lot of concepts just for the sake of changing them. I think the UI looks nice and vertical tabs work, but they're not necessarily better than horizontal tabs, certainly not enough to not have the option. Having bookmarks from other browsers as pinned tabs makes very little sense, especially in the way it's implemented. Arc isn't terrible, but there really isn't a lot to be gained from it.

A crazy new UI can give your browser some attention, but it can't really hold it if you're not adding anything of value. My day-to-day browser is Vivaldi, and a big part of the reason I use it is that not only does it have features like split view, but I can do things like add all my email addresses, RSS feeds, calendar events. Not every browser needs these things, of course, but they do add value for people that rely on them. With Arc, it doesn't feel like anything has much of a purpose other than just being different.

This is just the first public release, of course, so there's time for things to improve. But for all the hype the Arc browser has received, I don't think there's much here to keep people using it.