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 a little bit extra organized, a little bit extra helpful, and perhaps even a little bit extra pleasant. It has new concepts 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 group have been engaged on for the final 5 years. It’s not Arc 2.0, both, though Miller has been speaking publicly about Arc 2.0 for some time now. It’s a completely 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.

An odd factor has occurred during the last couple of years, Miller says. Arc has grown quick — customers quadrupled this 12 months alone — but it surely has additionally change into clear that Arc is rarely going to be a really mainstream product. It’s too sophisticated, too completely different, too exhausting 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.” Person interviews and information have satisfied the corporate that this can be a power-user instrument, and all the time can 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. Typically 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 quicker, smoother, safer. And truthful sufficient!

So The Browser Firm confronted a scenario many firms encounter: they’d a popular product that was by no means going to be a game-changer. Fairly than attempt to construct the subsequent 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 simply construct one thing new.

Arc is just not dying, Miller says. He says that again and again, the truth is, even after I inform him the YouTube video the corporate simply launched sounds just like the factor firms 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 group at The Browser Firm devoted to these. “In that sense,” Miller says, “it seems like a complete-ish product.” Many of the group’s vitality and time will now be devoted to ranging from scratch.

“Arc was mainly this front-end, tab administration innovation,” Miller says. “Folks cherished it. It grew like a weed. Then it began getting gradual and began crashing so much, and we felt dangerous, and we needed to learn to make it quick. And we form of misplaced sight, in some methods, of the truth that we’ve received to do the working system half.”

The plan this time is to construct not only a completely different interface for a browser, however a special form of browser totally — one that’s way more proactive, extra highly effective, extra AI-centric, extra in step with that authentic imaginative and prescient. Name it the iPhone of internet browsers, or the “web pc,” or no matter different metaphor you want. The concept 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 appear to be? Miller is a bit obscure on the main points. The brand new browser, which Miller intimates might launch as quickly as the start of subsequent 12 months, is designed to return with no switching prices, which implies amongst different issues that it’ll have horizontal tabs and fewer concepts about group. The concept is to “make the primary 90 seconds easy” in an effort to get extra folks to modify. After which, slowly, to disclose what this new browser can do.

Miller has a few favourite examples of how a browser would possibly assist you to get stuff performed, which he’s mentioned to me, on Decoder, and elsewhere in current months. There’s the instructor who spends hours copying and pasting information 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 kinds of issues {that a} browser, with entry to all of your internet apps and looking information, might start to do in your behalf. And with AI instruments like the brand new “Pc use” characteristic from Anthropic, that form of factor is starting to change into automated and doable.

Designing a browser that’s each accessible to everybody and a very 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 very good browser during the last 5 years. Now it’s time to get again to the actual job.