👏🏻 Arc 👏🏻 was 👏🏻 massively 👏🏻 influential 👏🏻
Yesterday, OpenAI pushed an update to their new ChatGPT Atlas browser that added a few nice features, most notably vertical tabs on the side of the browser window. And of course they would, right? This was technically a thing in some highly-customizable browsers like Vivaldi for years before, but Arc really made them mainstream and finally pinned down the experience: the sidebar wasn't just you open tabs, it was a list of "apps" you use regularly as well as your open windows all in one interface. On top of that, they had some of the best design-oriented developers in the biz making it, so everything felt fucking amazing to use.
Not to beat a dead horse, but The Browser Company moved on from Arc in large part because they said the UI was too unfamiliar for mainstream users, and the sidebar was a big part of that. It's simply funny to see the entire browser market from Microsoft Edge, to Opera, to Zen, to Firefox all follow in Arc's footsteps. As I noted a couple days ago, the most notable change to Dia in months has been adding a photocopy of Arc's sidebar. Now Atlas, the browser from the most influential company in the entire world over the past few years, is moving in this direction as well (your bookmarks can't live in the sidebar, so it's not exactly the same yet).
Anyway, I really wanted to call out how unbelievably influential Arc has been on the entire web browser market.