The Browser Company has offered its Arc Browser for Macs for a while, and late in 2023, it started sending invites for the Windows beta version. This week, the company announced new upcoming features that it hopes will speed things up for people searching for things on the internet.
In a YouTube video, The Browser Company outlined these features. The first is Instant Links, which is now available for beta testers. People can type in a very specific search request, and instead of going to Google, Bing, or another search engine, the browser brings in the links you want and puts them as tabs on your browser. The Arc Browser places those tabs on the left-hand side of the browser rather than on the top.
Another feature that will be added in the near future is Arc Explore. This time, when you search for something, the Arc Browser, using large language models, will start searching for you and will show you content on the screen, along with all of the information sources it has used to bring you the information that you asked for. You can continue chatting with the LLM as you would with Copilot or ChatGPT to get the specific information you need from your search.
Finally, Live Folders will launch in beta on February 15. This feature will let you follow websites placed in folders, and if the sites you follow get updated with a new blog post or a video, a new tab will show up in that folder with the updated content.
All of these changes have the potential to worry Google, Microsoft, and websites that depend on search engine results to get website links and, thus, money via ads. With that said, Microsoft Edge proves that even companies with unlimited funds have an extremely hard time luring Chrome users. It remains to be seen if a relatively small company and the features in its browser will make a dent in the search engine business model.
As we stated, the Arc Browser is available now for Mac, and it"s in private beta testing for Windows, with a planned full public launch sometime in the spring of 2024.