Best Browser Apps 2023

Arc is a browser. In simple terms, it's a replacement to Chrome, Safari, and Edge, but oh, also so much more... A big part of what makes Arc great is actually the fluidity and experience when using it.

If you try it out, you'll know what I mean.

Your browser has mainly just been in the background, right? You don't think that much about it, it's more just a tool to access the internet. Yeah, that's where Arc changes that—what if a browser could give you moments of micro-delight in the day-to-day usage? In fact, why don't other browsers?

Features

Arc's team have totally rethought the bookmarks and the "tab experience", along with introducing a feature called "Spaces". Spaces allow you to stay focused and easily segment your work while easily organizing tabs are important to you in folders.

For example, set up a personal space, favorite your YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Gmail tabs—from there, they function like mini apps. Now, with the swipe of 2 fingers, you're in your work space. All of your favorite apps are swapped out with your work apps, and you're logged into all of your work accounts:

No other browser lets you segment work to this degree. It's so powerful, yet such a simple implementation. Tough to truly explain without experiencing it yourself.

What clicked for me, is when someone explained the following to me (when I was at the time an avid user of Chrome): With Chrome, Google is in the business of ads, so they are actually incentivized to give you a crummy tab management experience. Why? Because what happens if finding the tab you're looking for is difficult? You open up a new tab and search Google again (and you're shown more ads).

So it's more that the UI/UX in many ways by the industry leader is built in such a way to optimize for displaying ads. Arc on the other hand is building features that give you a better experience, first-and-foremost.

Competition

Every single person that uses a computer, uses a browser. It's probably the most competitive software market in the world, and Google pays Apple some $20bn per year just to have Google set as the default search engine in Apple products.

Because of that, this can't be covered in just a single section in a post. Here's a full write-up on how Arc compares to the top browsers on the market.

If you're curious as to Arc vs Chrome or Arc vs Brave, you can see our thoughts there.

Learn More

If you're intrigued, want to know more, and see more of the features/benefits in GIF format, go check out this article where we've done a deep dive on why we think Arc is the future of the internet.

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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.

Design/Experience

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.

Extensions

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.

Final Thoughts

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.

Chromium is something you're likely using right now without even realizing it. Are you using Arc Browser, Chrome, Brave, or even Microsoft Edge right now? Okay, then you're using Chromium.

You know those extensions you have in the top-right corner? Yep, those are Chromium extensions (often referred to as "Chrome Extensions"). Little do people know, Google built an open-source foundation to the browser, for which most of the top browsers on the market use as their foundation.

Competition

I mean you're not exactly looking at traditional competition here, but Apple does use a competing standard called Webkit. So if you're using Safari on your computer, that's running on Webkit instead of Chromium.

The super interesting part here though is if you're using iOS, any browser you're using is actually built atop Webkit—even Google Chrome. Apple requires Webkit be used on iOS regardless.

Why exactly? Well, Google pays Apple some $20bn per year to be the default search engine in Safari, so holding onto Webkit on iOS and iPad is probably one of their leverage points:

“At-least we still own the foundation of the browsers for our products!”
-Apple (probably) 🤷

Final Verdict

This genuinely probably doesn't mean much to you, but you're probably using Chromium and you probably don't care.

Just know that it makes for switching between Chromium-based browsers far easier—from transferring bookmarks, to extensions, and everything inbetween.

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.

Features

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. 🤯

Competition

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).

Final Verdict

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.

This is the default browser that comes with mac devices, and has existed for over a decade.

With Safari, you're not going to get anything too cutting-edge or innovative, because they, like Google Chrome are focused on stability for their 1+ billion users.

For a further breakdown in understanding the negatives that come with browsers that have hit major scale, refer to our Chrome vs Safari comparison.

Features & Differentiation

Rating: _B-

Since Apple is a hardware company at the end of the day, the whole point of Safari is that you're going to get a great cohesive experience if you're using all Apple products (Mac + iPad + iPhone).

The largest benefit to be had here, in our eyes, comes from Apple owning both the hardware and software layers. This allows them to go above and beyond with optimizations like battery life and cross-device syncing.

While they have baked in password management

We don't really see much major innovation or differentiation coming to Safari though. Why? Because this isn't Apple's core business. Not only that, but Apple has zero interest in going after the B2B and collaborative browser space. When comparing Arc Browser vs Safari, you'll see first-hand that Arc has a lot more going on in the features and differentiation space as they ultimately want to be the browser for teams and collaboration.

Tab Management

We do applaud Apple for adding tab groups, and allowing for them to be on the side of the browser window. There's some small similarities when comparing Safari vs Brave in the recently released sidebar tab management in Brave and Arc.

User Interface (UI)

Rating: _C

With Safari, you get a familiar and safe UI. It looks like a browser, it looks pretty much the same as it has the past decade, and it's relatively bland in terms of how it looks.

There's just not much to mention here, but the truth of the matter is some of this is by design. Their focus is to be stable, functional, and to let the content of the website you're currently on, shine.

User Experience (UX)

Rating: _B-

This is where we can give Apple some props on the user-experience, if of course you're also using other Apple products. Take for example you visit a website on your iPhone, you get a prompt in your MacOS dock that shows a website was just opened on mobile. Want to open it up on your desktop? Simply click the Safari icon in your software dock.

In actually using the browser though, there's nothing in particular that stands out as an exceptional UX. This category in particular is where Arc shines. They have the smallest UX details, that just makes using the browser on the day-to-day so incredibly enjoyable.

Final Thoughts

Are you a huge Apple fan? Do you only care about getting the best possible battery performance on your MacBook and nothing else matters to you? Do you absolutely despise change? If so, Safari is probably fine for you.

If you're on the other hand sort of bored when looking at the existing browser market and wish you could get a bit more enjoyment and productivity out of your browser, then that's where you should definitely be giving Arc a shot.

Genuinely, give Arc a shot for a week straight as your daily driver, and I'm willing to bet you that you never come back to Safari again.

Arc Browser is genuinely what Apple could have made, had they re-thought the browser from the ground up, without all the baggage that currently exists with Safari. And for that reason, that's why we rank Arc at the top of our best browser apps list. Genuinely wouldn't be surprised if Apple one day acquired Arc and replaced it with Safari as the default browser for MacOS.