In my time using Arc, I’ve been struck by the product’s smooth, playful, and at times disorienting experience. I’ve enjoyed its clever tab organization and found its eclectic features refreshing. Screenshots, instead of remaining static images, come attached with a link to their source website, for example, while a whiteboarding tool called Easel allows you to create and share a sketchpad within the browser.

Still, he says, Arc’s waitlist has received tens of thousands of sign-ups. In anticipation of Arc’s public release this fall, Browser Co. is now signing up thousands of beta users per week.

The team running Chrome had to contend with one important factor: Even a slight design tweak to a product with 2 billion users could have significant financial consequences, according to Fisher. More “pan-galactic” changes, he adds, became almost impossible. During his last decade at the company, his team was very aware of the tendency toward tab chaos and even had ideas about how to tweak their browser to improve it. “The Chrome team has built all these things but has been unable to ship them” because features that sorted out the mess tended to result in fewer google.com search queries—and fewer Google ads, says Fisher, now an Arc adviser.

When they shared a rough Arc prototype with industry colleagues a year later, Darin Fisher, who was Chrome’s vice president for engineering until leaving Google in early 2021, remembers being blown away: “I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is the stuff I’ve wanted to be able to do for so long!’ ”

A grid of buttons pointing toward favorite destinations remains glued to the top of the panel. Each of these services operates more like a desktop app than a web page. Clicking the Gmail icon will take the user back to a single, original Gmail inbox, rather than reloading gmail.com in tab after tab. Hovering the mouse over a Google Calendar button will surface a tiny panel of upcoming appointments. Spotify comes with an embedded player to shuffle through songs. Any tabs opened throughout the day appear at the bottom of the panel and—this can take some getting used to—are automatically set to close and archive in 12 hours.