The Browser Company is building another browser, and it’s not called Arc.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: The Browser Company is developing a browser that it believes can make your Internet life a little more organized, a little more useful, and maybe even a little more enjoyable. It contains new ideas about tabs and what your browser can do for you.

I've heard this story before! But the browser that Browser Company CEO Josh Miller wants to talk about when he calls me on Thursday isn't Arc, the product he and his team have been working on for five years. It's not Arc 2.0 either, even though Miller has been talking publicly about Arc 2.0 for some time. It is a completely new browser. And for Miller and The Browser Company, it's a chance to get back to work on the future of browsers they originally set out to create.

Something strange has happened in the last few years, says Miller. Arc has grown quickly – the number of users has quadrupled this year alone – but it has also become clear that Arc will never be a truly mainstream product. It's too complicated, too different, too difficult to get involved with. “There's just too much new and change,” says Miller, “to reach the number of people we really want to reach.” User interviews and data have convinced the company that it's a power user tool and always will be.

On the other hand, people who use Arc tend to love Arc. They love the sidebar, they love rooms and profiles, they love all the customization options. In general, these users have also settled into Arc – Miller says it's not so much that they want new features, but just that their browser is faster, smoother and more secure. And fair enough!

Therefore, The Browser Company faced a situation that many companies face: they had a popular product that was never going to be groundbreaking. Instead of trying to fit the next thing into the current, risking both pissing off the people who like it and never reaching the people who don't, the company decided to just build something new.

Arc doesn't die, says Miller. He keeps saying this, even after I told him that the YouTube video the company just released sounds like what the companies say Right before they kill a product. It's just that Arc isn't going to change much anymore. There will be stability updates and bug fixes, and The Browser Company has a dedicated team for that. “In that sense,” says Miller, “it feels like a complete product.” Most of the team’s energy and time is now being spent on starting from scratch.

“Arc was basically this front-end and tab management innovation,” says Miller. “People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it became slower and crashed often. We felt bad and had to learn to do it quickly. And we kind of lost sight of the fact that we need to take care of the operating system part.”

This time the plan is to build not just a different user interface for a browser, but a completely different kind of browser – one that is much more proactive, more capable, more AI-centric, and more in line with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or the “internet computer,” or whatever other metaphor you want to use. The idea is to turn the browser into an app platform. Miller still wants to do it, and he wants to do it for everyone.

What does that look like? Miller is somewhat vague about the details. The new browser, which Miller said could launch as soon as early next year, is designed to have no switching costs, which means, among other things, that it will have horizontal tabs and fewer organizational ideas. The idea is to “make the first 90 seconds effortless” to encourage more people to switch. And then, slowly, to reveal what this new browser can do.

Miller has a few favorite examples of how a browser can help you get things done, which he told me decoderand elsewhere in recent months. There's the teacher who spends hours copying and pasting data between corporate applications; the Shopify sellers who spend too much time looking up order numbers and then pasting them into customer support emails. These are the things that a browser with access to all your web apps and browsing data could do on your behalf. And with AI tools like Anthropic's new Computer Usage feature, this kind of thing is starting to become automated and possible.

It won't be easy to design a browser that is both accessible to everyone and completely new. The Browser Company has already tried it once and ended up here. But Miller is happy to have spent the last five years building a good browser. Now it's time to get back to the actual job.

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