Everyone knows what a browser is, in-fact, you're using one right now to read this. Making it the most used software of any category, and thus, the most competitive.
The web browser category used to be far more interesting, back when Internet Explorer was the leader in the space, as it opened up competition from Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
In recent times, the category has struggled to evolve, primarily due to inertia (people are just used to using what they use, and how it is laid out), so change and differentiation of any kind is actually seen more as a negative to many.
Add that to companies like Google getting billions of daily active users and businesses using and relying on Google Chrome, and you're left with a foundational tool that by design, cannot evolve or change, without upsetting the majority of their user-base.
Enter all the tech startups entering the space, trying to make browsers "more productive", like Sidekick browser and Shift, and even chromium extensions browsers/tab managers like Workona and Toby. While exciting at face-value, they all struggle with the same issue: inertia. People are so built to using a browser the way they're used to using them. Tabs and URL bar at the top, bookmarks, and extensions. Deviate from that, and you're sure to not last, even if you do find some innovation along the way.
I used and loved Shift for a couple years on-and-off, and early on, they had to manually port over the chrome extensions, so it never actually had everything I needed, to fully replace it with Chrome. That was the #1 piece that killed it for me, and that's exactly where you'll see the moat of Chrome exists. Pair that with the miscellaneous performance and minor daily UX frustrations, and it just can't function as your primary browser replacement.
This is where a new entrant in the space, Arc Browser, is trying to (and is), shaking things up. In got the foundation right. By focusing on just MacOS out of the gate and a modern native software stack, they have one of the most enjoyable user-experiences of any browser on the market.
Mix that with innovation of re-thinking bookmarks and tab management, you're getting actual innovation in the space, but not in a gimmicky way, but in a way that first got the foundation perfected. Want to simply use it as your browser and have it feel like what you're used to? It works great for that, it just introduces little pieces of delightful user-experiences along the way. Something that is all too uncommon in the browser space over the past decade.
It's actually starting to feel like those competitive days back when Firefox was first launching, and you started seeing actual competition and innovation happening in the browser space. Difference is, Arc is really the only one doing this right now, because they can. Oddly enough, because they don't yet have billions of daily active users (yet). Making this a very exciting time to be interested in the browser space again.
They are re-thinking what it actually means to even be a browser.
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The browser by Google.
Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, owning over 60% of the browser marketshare—so chances are, you're reading this site in Google Chrome right now.
Love it or hate it, you should appreciate it. Without Chrome, Chromium wouldn't exist—why does that matter? Well the open-source browser foundation that was built by Google is likely powering whatever browser you're using right now.
All-in-all, Chrome is great. It was our main browser for over a decade. And yes, we tried all of leading browsers on the market (Brave, Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Safari—even giving Edge fair shot when they introduced OpenAI into the mix).
We continued going back to Chrome—it was just familiar and worked well, especially if your personal and work life are tied to Google (as many are).
Well... That was up until Arc.
Rather than describe all of the features you're probably already familiar with like tabs and bookmarks, I think it's time better spent explaining why you shouldn't really expect new features with Chrome.
When you have a product that has billions of users and hundreds of millions of companies relying on it, you need to focus on stability over everything else.
Is that why it took the Chrome team over a year of beta testing "Tab Groups" before publicly releasing it? Oh, and then only leaving it core to the new tab experience for a few months before ultimately disabling it and making it a manual opt-in feature.
Yeah, that's because of inertia. Billions of people are expecting the browser to work one way, you can't have core functionality change one day without pissing off potentially hundreds of millions of people.
Okay, okay, so all of that is totally fair... But also sorta a boring answer 😅 okay, you win—let's ruffle some feathers!
Ah good-ol bookmarks! Tried, true, and tested. Do they actually work well for referencing back what you saved? Nope! But they are familiar, so don't touch them!
Wait... You said they don't work well—let's dive into that for a moment. Hear me out—bookmarks weren't actually created to make finding pages you're looking for to be easier.
The more you use bookmarks, the less you search Google to find what you are looking for, and the less ads that Google can serve you. Ah! Misaligned incentives! Get overwhelmed with all your open tabs? Google wants this! It results in you closing the overwhelm of tabs, only to later search Google to find back what you're looking for.
What if bookmarks and tab management could be rethought and reinvented 🤔 well they can be, that's why much of Chrome's team have left Google to join Arc Browser to actually build out all the ideas that they had at Google but were killed because releasing them would actually hurt Google's Ad business. 🤯
Before Arc, I've have just told you that the major competitors on the market were pretty much the same thing, with slight opinionation. Take Brave, the privacy-focused opinionation. Looks and feels almost identical to Chrome, but you don't need to sign up with an email address to use it (you instead have a hash key).
If you're on MacOS, give Arc Browser a shot—it's essentially what Chrome could have been if they didn't rely on an ad business (although it's coming soon to Windows as well). It genuinely rethinks from the ground up of what a browser is, and could be. They bake in delight into every interaction, and it just does more.
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There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
A privacy-focused (and crypto/blockchain-focused) browser built atop Chromium.
Brave was originally built more as a cryptocurrency/blockchain-focused browser, tied quite closely to the BAT token (Basic Attention Token).
The whole premise was that you can get paid in BAT tokens by referring others to use Brave, and just for using Brave. These tokens could then be used to support creators and websites.
They are essentially trying to take back control from the traditional ad model, and compensate their users versus selling their data, like that of Chrome.
For that reason, they have ad-blocking enabled by default (similar to Arc, which just enables the uBlock Origin chrome extension on the back-end).
They also have things like a VPN and a crypto wallet baked in at a core—this will either totally connect with you, or mean nothing. If the latter, it's probably not the right browser for you.
Brave looks and feels a lot like... Well, Chrome/Chromium. They've modernized the interface a bit by adding in optional features like vertical tab support:
That said, it still looks and feels like most browsers do—for better or worse. They don't seem to be taking any risky bets or overly experimenting on the design/UI/UX-front, which is honestly fine for what most people are expecting to get out of their browser.
The interesting thing here is that Brave, like many of the leading browsers on the market use Chromium at the core (e.g. Chrome, Arc, Opera, Vivaldi, and even more recently Microsoft Edge).
What this allows for is the same browser extension support, and more broadly, all these browsers have the same underlying rendering engine (open sourced by Google).
Point being, changing browsers between Chromium-based browsers makes switching between them pretty seamless (low friction), and Brave is no exception here.
Brave often connects most with heavily privacy-focused individuals, for whom are typically more in the crypto space. For example, at Consensus 2023, most people I talked to were using, or at least familiar with Brave.
A asked them what they liked most about it, and their responses were almost entirely around the privacy aspect. For example, "they don't even know what I'm bookmarking—my account is tied to a hashed key, so I can anonymously save my environment, and re-access it with my unique token—no email address/identification required."
And look, I get it, it's impressive to how they are leveraging the blockchain to store some of this information without tying it to identity, but personally for me, I'll take the benefits that come with using a traditional database and user account, like most other modern browsers like Arc and Chrome rely on for storing and syncing your data between devices.
If you're considering Brave, I genuinely think you already know yourself. But if you're not quite obsessed with privacy, to the level of at times potentially inconveniencing yourself (e.g. you forget your unique hash/key, you lose your history and settings—there's no "forgot password" per-say).
If you think privacy is important enough to not want to use Chrome though, there are genuinely other privacy-focused alternatives (in that they aren't trying to sell your data unlike Google with Chrome is), like Arc Browser. If you're on MacOS (Windows coming soon), definitely recommend giving that a shot.
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
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