Summary
The new "Arc" browser offers a unique feature called "Easel" that allows users to create custom dashboards of the web.
Abstract
The Arc browser, developed by The Browser Company, offers a unique feature called "Easel" that lets users create custom dashboards of the web. Easel allows users to take screenshots of web pages and paste them onto an Easel page, making them interactive and live. This feature enables users to create a dashboard of crucial pages they want to stay on top of, such as Gmail, Todoist, Mastodon, and Medium. The concept of turning a browser into a morphable, super-customizable portal is considered very cool and could potentially be adopted by other browsers.
Opinions
Recently I got a chance to try out the new “Arc” browser, made by The Browser Company. (It’s Mac-only right now, alas, but if that’s your OS you can get on the waiting list here.)
Right out of the box, I quite liked it — because it’s designed for power users who open a ton of tabs. (Indeed, one of the browser’s designers, Nate Parrott, openly said “I wanted to encourage tab-hoarding behavior”, which greatly warmed my heart.
So there are a bunch of features I noticed right away that are superb. It has “vertical” tabs, which, as I’ve written before, are terrific because they free up vertical space, making it easier to read web pages. Indeed, Arc even tucks its URL bar off in the top left corner, so there’s even more up-and-down reading space; a bold and smart move.
Plus, there are oodles of cool features for managing your tabs, all clustered in the far left-hand column of the browser. You can pin your most-often-used tabs at the top of the column so they’re always there, making it kind of like a mini home-screen on your phone, with your favorite apps always at hand. (You can see mine below: I pinned Gmail, Notion, Todoist, Google Docs, Mastodon and Medium there …)
On top of that, the browser has built in a lot of slick ways of managing your tabs. You can group big bunches of tabs into “groups” so that you can juggle a few projects at once; you can drag tabs onto each other and split the screen to use sites side-by-side. You can even tweak the way Arc displays the HTML or CSS on a site you use a lot, if you want the site to look different.
Now, a lot of these features are available in other browsers, more or less. A lot of them are in Vivaldi, my daily go-to browser for seven years now. We’re living in kind of a golden age of browser experimentation, frankly, with companies ranging from Brave to Synth to Sidekick to SigmaOS and Mighty trying all manner of stuff — it’s great news for the open web.
But to my mind, the coolest part of Arc?
It isn’t its tab-management stuff. It’s something else:
The “Easels”.
An Easel is a page you can create inside the Arc browser that’s composed of snippets from other web sites.
In its simplest form, you could think of an Easel as like a mood board — you can grab pictures from around the web and paste them into an Easel. You can also mark up the Easel, drawing on it with your mouse, or adding text, or boxes.
But the really wild thing is that you can add interactive, live snippets of other web sites.
Whenever you’re looking at a web page in Arc, you can click the little “camera” icon in the URL bar and it lets you take a screenshot of the page you’re on. You can draw a box around a particular chunk of the page that you want to screenshot. Thus far this is pretty normal browser behavior.
Except after you take a screenshot, Arc lets you paste it onto an Easel page — and it becomes live and interactive. You can click on that little screenshot and it’s just like interacting with the original page. For example, I took a screenshot of the top part of my Gmail inbox, pasted it onto an Easel, and voila: I can now click on emails, open them, or delete them. It’s like having a small chunk of my Gmail embedded inside the Easel.
I can take that Easel and add interactive chunks from other pages, too. This allows you to create an Easel that’s a little dashboard — a quick way of peeking at several sites that you want to monitor.
For example, I made an Easel that shows me my top latest Gmail messages, my top to-dos from Todoist, my mentions from Mastodon, and the play-controls from my Spotify account. In essence, it’s a dashboard of the most crucial pages I want to stay on top of.
I’m not gonna show it to you, because it has private emails on it. But here’s another example — a screenshot of an Easel I made while working on this post …
It has a snippet of my Todoist account (showing the to-dos for writing this post, click as I did them), a viewable Youtube video about Easels, some text notes I jotted down, a live player from Bandcamp of a band I was listening to, and a live update of local weather (I was thinking of taking a bike ride later).
Using these Easels is incredibly weird, but fun. You’re looking at one page, but it’s composed of … little portals to other pages. It’s incredibly convenient.
If you want to see what it’s like in action, here’s a video of an Arc engineer creating his own Easel with live snippets from Reddit, Hacker News, and sports sites …
(At the very top of this story there’s another video by an Arc engineer showing off her own Easel.)
Now, this live-clippings-of-other-apps is not a totally new idea. Back in the mid-00s I visited Microsoft Research and they showed off a tool that worked in a similar way across Windows: You could take little snippets of your various Windows apps and see them all in one place.
So, not entirely new. But I’ll give the Arc folks credit: They’ve done a very slick job of making a browser version of this concept. It’s like a no-code tool for making a personalized view of the web.
Easels are also shareable, which is quite interesting. If you were, say, going on a camping trip with friends, you could create an Easel with live local weather report, an interactive map of the area, and a to-do list for shopping that everyone could click and use.
Personally, I’d love to see more browsers bite off this trick, assuming the folks making Arc haven’t patented it. (Given how much prior art there is, it may not be a patentable invention? Though the patent office is basically broken and does little serious research, so who knows.) The idea of turning a browser into a morphable, super-customizable portal is really damn cool.
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I’m a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. I’m also the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. I’m @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram, and @[email protected] on Mastodon.
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