What makes Arc different from other browsers?
Whereas other browsers now mainly exist to track you around the internet (in order to better target ads), we built Arc with you in mind — to save you as much time as possible when you use the internet every day. To bring order to the chaos of your online life, stuck between rows and rows of tabs. We do that within a gorgeous interface that respects your privacy and was built with care.
In other words, Arc is to your ex-browser what the iPhone was to cellphones. Or as one of our members said “like moving from a PC to a Mac.” It’s from the future — and just feels great.
Don’t just take our word for it: The Verge says that Arc is “the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for,” a famous YouTuber said it was “the most beautiful and well-designed browser I have ever used,” and Fast Company declared “Arc — not Chrome — is the best browser out there” because it’s “more elegantly designed” and “easy to organize tabs by project and context”.
How does Arc plan to make money?
First things first: we will never sell your data and we will never have a business that revolves around ads. In fact, we started this company because we were so unhappy with the way other browsers prioritize advertisers (over regular internet people like us).
Don’t get us wrong — we plan to make a lot of money as a company, in order to provide you (and ourselves) with the most wondrous and personal internet experience for many years to come. To do that, we’re excited about business models that align our incentives with the people who we serve: from charging companies that want to increase the productivity of their teams across the many tools they use for work, to making it easier and safer to pay for things online.
More to come! For now, rest assured that your data and security is of utmost importance to us — it is our pledge to never violate your trust.
What sort of data does Arc track?
Our plain-english Privacy Policy summarizes it well:
- We don’t know which websites you visit
- We don’t see what you type into the browser
- We don’t sell your data to third parties
You create an account so that you don’t lose your data and can sync it across devices — and there are only a few instances where you can decide whether you want to share select data. For example, if you write in to our support channels, we’ll have the information that you willingly share to help resolve your bug. Some of our optional features share data with our third-party partners, but we’ll always tell you which data and when it’s shared — so you can make the choices that are right for you. And finally, we have anonymized data about the relative popularity of features.
We view Arc as your personal home on the internet, and we respect the privacy and sanctity of that space.
Will Arc sell my data?
No, absolutely not. Zero chance. Never.
We know that you’ve been burned by tech companies before (so have we), which is one of the reasons we want you to get to know the team on our YouTube channel. Hopefully, you’ll see that we’re earnest, idealistic and transparent humans who just want a better internet for ourselves and you.
A “better internet” means a more private one — our aim is to give agency to individuals, not advertisers and corporations.
Is Arc available on Windows or Linux?
Arc has arrived on Windows! You can download it here. Arc is the first-ever Windows application to be built in Swift, which is a pretty big deal! Our aim is to make the best designed Windows application ever created, and we hope that you will hold us to that aspiration.
We don't support Arc on Linux at the moment.
Is Arc based on Chromium?
Yes, which means it supports all of the Chrome Extensions and websites that are essential to your internet workflows. That said, we’ve stripped away all of the unfortunate parts that Google has in there to support their ad business — we actually share a list of all the features we’ve disabled here. In other words, Arc is Chromium without the junk, which makes it faster too!
Excitingly, we built Arc in a way that makes it easy to swap rendering engines in the future. This means we may offer a WebKit version one day, or even build a rendering engine of our own. Time will tell!
The point is: Arc is Chromium-based in order to make it effortless to adopt and use with the applications and extensions that you rely on every day. But it doesn’t violate your privacy like other Chromium-based browsers.
Does Arc support Chrome Extensions?
Yes, Arc supports 100% of the Extensions that Chrome supports. In fact, you can fully import all of your data from Chrome to Arc in less than 5 seconds when you download it.