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by H12 1141 days ago
I've been using Arc on my personal machine for a couple months now, and my favorite feature is one that surprised me:

Tab persistence is opt-in

Meaning that, unless you explicitly pin a tab, or stick it in a folder you create, it will get automatically closed after some period of time (in practice for me this meant between browsing sessions).

Initially this surprised and annoyed me, but over time it prodded me to be intentional about evaluating whether my tabs are disposable, or need to be held on to across multiple sessions, which I've found led to much tidier browsing habits.

Other features of Arc (spaces, pop-up previews, folders, tab renaming) aren't particularly novel, but the way they integrate seamlessly and function intuitively with inputs I'm used to, has made the whole thing a really pleasant experience in a way I've never been able to achieve by cobbling together extensions in other browser.

Really hope their ideas catch on and they start to see some competition because Arc is doing a great job bringing novelty while maintaining polish and I'd love to see some of this UX replicated in a non-chromium browser.

2 comments

It's been interesting seeing tab persistence slowly become the default in recent years. I've never quite understood it. Maybe it's just my way of coping with some sort of mild undiagnosed ADD, but if I open my browser for one thing and something else pops up I tend to forget what the first thing was so I've always set my browser up to open a single tab to about:blank (or at least some sort of blank page. It's gotten more complicated recently). It's always interesting to see how other people's brains work, but also validating to hear I'm not the only one with a need for "tidier browsing habits".
there’s also different mindsets when browsing. I want my “junk drawer” of tabs to be automatically tidied but my more curated long term tabs in named tab groups to be persistent

But I never seem to use tab groups as much as I am theoretically excited to :/

I use a FF extension to do something similar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/

I usually do Reddit/HN binges where Ill open up 30+ tabs that are of interest and make my way through the list but if I don't get to them in under 10 minutes, the tabs automatically close and I'll forget them while still getting the dopamine hit of clicking on all the novel headlines :)