I’m still baffled by the success of
@arcinternet by
@browsercompany. Building a browser in 2024 shouldn’t work… here’s why (and why Arc works anyway):
There’s a concept in
@ycombinator called “tar pit ideas”: Business ideas that look tempting, but most founders shouldn’t do (e.g. “Uber for X” type of stuff).
@daltonc recently put this well in a video with
@mwseibel:
“It’s a very popular set of ideas, so the bar is higher if you’re going to be working in this kind of space.”
Browsers are one of those ideas: No major UI innovations since the tab switcher in 1997. Google, Microsoft, and Apple’s combined market share is 88 %. And nobody’s complaining about their browser.
But if you’re in tech, you’re probably reading this in Arc (or your coworkers are wondering why you haven’t switched yet). Arc is growing like a wildfire.
How do they do it? It looks like they’re just meeting that incredibly high bar, but that’s not the full truth. Arc is based on a core insight: Most apps now run in the browser, which means browsers are now operating systems.
My colleague
@FLobsien recently wrote a breakdown of how this insight lets The Browser Company break all the rules and still succeed.
Want to find out how to succeed in an impossible category? Read the full breakdown under the link in the thread.