Why Arc could be your AI browser in 2024
For those unaware about Arc the Browser (As was I until a day back..)
“Arc is a browser that’s designed with privacy in mind. It has a built-in ad blocker and tracker blocker, and the company doesn’t collect personal data”
Privacy of course is important, but what’s really interesting is their step towards becoming the defacto AI browser.
Arc recently announced that users could now replace default google search with perplexity AI.
What’s perplexity? Put simply, It’s an alternative to ChatGPT. Think of chatGPT as your researcher, and think of Perplexity as your AI agent that (who?) helps you perform specific tasks.
Personally, I’ve found myself using it a lot more than chatGPT. It is reliably faster/less hallucinatory while being more visually appealing. But, moving on..
As a no non-sense person, you might go — Do i really need a new browser? I’m already using chatgpt/perplexity on chrome.
So, we must ask, Is their navigation UX incredibly better in any important way? What makes them capable of working better with AI stuff?
1) Easy Data Inputs -
As if chatting with AI chatbots wasn’t mesmerising enough already, the fact we can now feed it different kinds of data — picture, text file etc (multi modal) is honestly bonkers.
But this multimodal input actually solves a crucial need.
If we want perplexity, our agent, to perform tasks successfully/precisely to boost our productivity, we need to be able to provide it the rawest of raw information! this would mean a media, a text file etc etc
So naturally, in such a productivity oriented flow, the ease of inputting becomes important to be seamless
Arc browser has an inbuilt file viewer which helps users quickly access files/pics/text without having to leave the browser
This way they’re able to provide agents information faster and much more easily
2) Tabs-in-a-Tab
Imagine this — You’re on chrome with 20+ tabs researching movies you want to watch amongst other personal explorations. A work text comes in, and you now need to perform a new deep dive, which requires you to switch between the tabs. To separate the two kinds of explorations, you decide to dump the new tabs onto a new window…. and soon, before you know it— even the windows become hard to navigate through.
This was mildly painful before AI.
With AI, this behaviour becomes the norm. We find ourselves constantly switching back and forth between website (W) <> perplexity/chatGPT (P). With more parallel explorations joining the party, soon your browser navigation bar looks like W1 P1 P2 P3 W3 W2…
Arc has solved for this, with their tabs-in-a-tab look.
Using it, users can couple the AI agent against a current website.
- helping them access AI search easily
- keeping each agent isolated helping maintain context
Ultimately painlessly organising all parallel explorations.
Arc’s UX, for web explorations which inevitably contain AI, appears to already be much more pleasing than Chrome.
It’ll be interesting to observe what more user benefits their partnership leads to.
Given the rapidity of AI related changes, we can be sure there’ll be tons more to explore in the coming months, if not weeks….
Of course, the decision to transition for many might not be obvious, yet. For eg: perplexity doesn’t return search results as quickly as google, ime
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