Josh Miller
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Maybe you should go work for him. So I went to get a job at Meetup. And on my first day of the internship, Scott gets up and he says, we're going to turn away from the banks and we're going to turn to each other on Kickstarter. And we're going to turn away from big box retailers and we're going to turn to each other on Etsy. And he went on and on. And it was deeply inspiring.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And it was that part of me that fell in love with tech and the idealism behind it. And to me, that shows two things. One, I have always been motivated by people at the other end. And two, Scott was totally wrong. I love him. But I think, honestly, the part of me after the election that said, I got to fix something. We got to do something. We got to fix democracy with technology.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I'm still an optimist. I still care about people. But I think we now have right size what our role should be, which is instead of saying in that moment, how do we as some tech company with 20 people fix democracy or improve our civic society?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's just as worthy and ambitious to say, my sister-in-law, who's a teacher and spends hours every day copying and pasting between different software to be a teacher, let's get rid of that busy work for her. That is just as ambitious and that's just as worthy. And so honestly, there's kind of been this personal transformation from,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
early 20s, the internet is going to fix everything to, hey, let's just make our friends and our family and our lives a little better every day. So don't get me wrong. I still have that part of me that is as idealistic and hopeful that the web and the ideas behind the internet can improve these top level ideas.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But we are much more interested in almost like the anthropological approach to Neil I's day. How do we make it a little bit better and find worth in that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
This is where I'm just a big believer in the web. As tricky a moment as it is in many ways, I believe the web has won, is winning, and will win. And I think in the web, there are enough parties involved. There are enough incentives where it's not really about the browser company. It's about betting that the web is an application platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And the decentralized nature of it will mean that people will still keep building for the web. And as long as people are building applications for the web and the center of gravity, especially in this world of AI, love it or hate it, is heading even more to the web,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think there's enough incentives in the industry and the ecosystem to suggest that if we build one user agent for it, there's really good work we can do there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We have kind of functional teams, design, engineering, but we really like to organize in deeply cross-functional pods. So we hire people that tend to be mutts, as we like to say in endearing ways. They come from different backgrounds with different skill sets beyond just whatever their title is.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And then we put them together in these little pods of five people and give them a prompt like, how can we help make... The experience of Shopify sellers. How do we make it easier to use their tools every day? And we give them six weeks and say, go. And they try a bunch of things and we see what happens.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It depends. But actually, it's reversed in the order we do it. So one of our first hires was a woman named Adina. And she runs a team now called the Membership Team. So what we start with is actually conversations with Shopify sellers. And we watch them use their computer. We ask them about their problems, the things they do every day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And we actually try to abstract solutions for them based on that. So sometimes we focus on individual tools. So we built this feature called GitHub Live Folders. that if you're a software engineer and someone needs a code review from you, it'll just automatically pop up and say, hey, Nilay needs you to review his code. That's something specific for GitHub.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And other times, we'll take an idea and abstract it to something that can work everywhere. So we heard the story from a teacher last week, actually, where she said she spends an hour every week taking attendance logs from a Google Sheet that she has and copy and pasting them into a school district-wide CMS of some sort for attendance records. And it takes her an hour. That makes me so mad.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We can send reusable rockets to space, apparently, but we have teachers spending an hour doing copy paste, copy paste, tab switching. So Nate on our team last week prototyped this mass paste idea, where in one fell swoop, you can take a bunch of data from one tab and paste it in a very formatted, structured way into another tab.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So there's an example relative to GitHub where the seed of the idea was this teacher with this very specific piece of software she has to use for her very specific job. But in it is this much larger, relatable idea of we can all relate to copy and pasting back and forth between tabs incessantly. So it's a little bit of both, but it always starts with a person.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It always starts with people, and it always starts with going out into the world and trying to understand. Sometimes it's a family member. Sometimes it's a cousin. Sometimes it's a stranger. Like, what are they experiencing on the web every day?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
If you talk to these application developers, one of their complaints is actually browser vendors are pretty restrictive about what they can do in the browser. So one of our popular features is in our Command-T text box, you can type new Notion document. And you can hit Enter, and it'll create a new Notion document. Notion loves that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Notion can't do that in Chrome or Safari because Google's trying to protect its search ad revenue. So there are examples of places where we're actually giving developers more access than they would in other browsers because we're not optimizing for search ads.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And then there are other examples where there are actually things that you can only do at the browser layer that exist across multiple tabs. So if you think about the teacher example, the things that the developer of Google Sheets and the obscure public school district CMS application would need to do to have an integration, that's never going to happen.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But at the browser layer, because we sit underneath all of it, we can actually do those things very easily. So it obviously depends on the feature.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But generally speaking, because other browsers are designed to be essentially big search boxes for the search ad business model, there hasn't been as much innovation at the interface layer or the operating system level of a browser, such that application developers, I think, are very excited about the access that they will be able to have.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And there are things we can do across web applications that would be difficult otherwise.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah, I would say unequivocally, putting aside my own feelings about it, that the web, since we started the company five years ago and the trend lines have continued, is becoming more and more of an application platform. I think that's undeniable. I think it's very exciting. I think it poses some problems in the context of publishing. I also think...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
As you mentioned, there are these words, there are these phrases, application platform. My wife in her job has things she has to do. I don't think it is going away that sometimes she needs information. And actually frequently she needs information. So I think what has changed is, as you know, the origins of the web were a publishing platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
They're actually closer to TikTok or Twitter in many ways than an application platform at the time. What has changed is that mix shift has moved towards more applications. But the idea that as part of your job, as part of your personal life, you need to find something out or learn about something, that's not going away. But I think the trend lines are towards it as an application platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yes, absolutely. And in fact, keep in mind, I'm 33. I grew up on the desktop web. Like to me, that's where I got lost as a child in my curiosities. And so, in fact, it's been a process for me to admit to myself that this thing that I loved about the web and I wanted from the web. It's if you look out again from a sociology, from a human perspective, we're not seeing it as much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think you said that I also think is true and makes me so mad. is, yes, if you're going to start, put a piece of information out, you probably should start a TikTok channel. I don't like that, but I think that is true.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think one of the interesting things, though, is if you go back to the origins of the web as a publishing platform, what we've learned about publishing platforms in retrospect is it missed two big things. distribution and discovery. We now know that the most powerful part of any publishing platform is discovery. And the web publishing platform didn't have that built in.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Google's a hack in many ways for that. TikTok's a hack for that. The second thing it didn't have baked in is payments. Can you imagine the iOS ecosystem if Apple didn't have native payments that were easy and seamless? Think about what that's done for subscriptions and purchasing apps. Yes, there are a lot of challenges with 30% taxes, but it enabled this thriving marketplace.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so if I look at the trajectory of the mix shift on the web towards applications, there are reasons for us to rush. People are rushing towards it. And if I look at the reasons that information or publishing has faded, I think it can really come down to those two missing elements. I wish I knew what you could do about that because, again, the web is a decentralized protocol.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think you can look at those two factors and explain a lot. I'm curious if you agree or if you have thought about that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I love nothing more than to get involved with that. I mean, because another thing we think about are the fundamental economics of browsers and the web itself, which is so dependent on ads. And I think often these conversations are binary. Ads are bad or good. That's not what I'm saying.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But I think there's so much more potential in the ways that browsers and publishers to the web and applications to the web could monetize if payments were built in. I think that's extremely exciting. It's a great example of somewhere where it's sort of a win-win-win. If you make payments easier, the individual is happy because it's easier to make payments.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You don't have to pull out your credit card. The merchant's happy because you grease the wheels. It's easier to have transactions. And whoever's connecting the two is making money as well. So I find payments fascinating. I think it could do so much good for the web. The flip side of believing in the web is we are a minnow. We're barely a minnow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so one of the interesting tensions we feel in this conversation, I'm sure we'll talk about our searches. We've got ideas. We're excited, but we're not at Chrome scale. We're not at Safari scale.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So if we ever have the privilege of getting to a place where our voice can move the ecosystem in some way, I think adding payments natively to the browser and that layer of the stack would do wonders for the ecosystem. And I hope that we or someone gets there because I think it would be fantastic.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We don't currently charge for anything, but we, as part of this kind of 2.0 product that's coming out soon, we're going to be charging individuals and businesses for a plan that does more of your busy work for you than the kind of default plan. So don't have anything concrete to announce yet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
uh potentially i mean it's a it's a when you say plan that usually means recurring revenue not we're going to sell you a browser one time for 49 in a box yeah so the honest answer is we don't have the specific details yet but what we are sure of is we want an exchange of value which is we do your busy work for you we save you time we save you clicks we help you through your day and either you or your employer pays us whether or not that is through a subscription model or usage based or some sort of token system is is something we're still figuring out but
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We're really excited about that ambition to say, hey, can you truly save that much time for someone that either them or their boss would fork over money for? What are the pros and cons of the different choices? A very long conversation. But I think I... Subscription is easier in many ways. It's more familiar.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
What I really like about something closer to usage-based pricing is that I really want a direct exchange of value. I want it to feel as much the more you use it, the more you pay us because the more value we're delivering to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There's some tricky things to think about in terms of you also want people to really develop a habit with your product because they have all this inertia from Chrome and Safari. You don't want to push people away from using it more and more. But I'm confident or at least hopeful that we can get around that. We're always going to have a free plan.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We hope to put as much in the free plan as possible. But yeah, it's a tricky one.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Do you have a hesitation there? There's nothing in the product today that we are going to charge people for.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So what we're really excited in this next evolution is how can we take the idea behind this automatic picture-in-picture player, automatically cleaning up and managing your tabs for you, can we take that to the extreme and do more and more busy work for you such that that additional time savings, that additional work we take off your plate, that additional tedious time
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
you know, monotonous stuff that you have to do and you no longer have to do, you can imagine some of that being stuff that we charge for. Also, this is a danger of doing this in person because I was not supposed to talk about this, but you loosened me up a little bit. So I'm going to get in trouble for talking about this later.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
That is not currently the plan. ArcSearch, when you... And it's worth noting, we really think of Arc as the companion app to the desktop product. So... We definitely have a challenge with words and branding as a theme I'm taking from this conversation, but the intention of ArcSearch is the mobile browser to the desktop browser. Sure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah, so our intention is that the paid offering, which again, will apply on mobile too, not the ARC search that you see today, but the additional functionality on top of it is what will subsidize the kind of free version for folks.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah. What people do in ARK today doesn't actually cost us all that much money. And our ambition is to make this free for as many people as possible. As we get into more AI inference intensive tasks for people that take off more and more busy work, that's where both I think we want to be a sustainable business that exists for a long time. It's about time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But also I think the costs get more prohibitive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
In some sense, it's terrifying. We have absolutely, on paper... no advantage. They have more money. They have more people. They have more all of the things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think over time, as we've built more and more features and gotten this question more and more, I think what we're realizing is if we're truly going to build the successor to the browser, what comes after it, I'm going to avoid branding it since I've branded too many things. That is really a holistic rethinking of our interface to the internet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think that and the care and the detail that goes into that, it's not as simple as popping on an AI sidebar chat onto Chrome. And there are examples of other browser vendors that have clearly taken ideas from us and done their own versions of it. And it hasn't gotten in the way of our growth or success so far.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So I think if you look at it at a top-down perspective, how are we going to beat Google or Apple or Microsoft? it's tricky to give you an answer that is convincing. I think the lived experience so far is we keep our heads down. We optimize for building something that people love and truly helps them in their day-to-day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And we think about this from a blank page perspective of not what did browsers do yesterday, but how can we build a cohesive day on the internet that saves you time and does your busy work for you? I think it'll be difficult for the other vendors to just bolt that onto their existing products. Now at At some scale, might they do what happened to Slack with Teams? Of course.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We're in a capitalistic society that will happen. I think there is the room for us to run if we are focused and we are fast and we really do what we're best at. But time will tell.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think the fascinating thing about Safari in general is, Safari, and we have this on good sources, is the most used application in the Apple ecosystem. more time is spent in Safari than any other application. But if you go look at the size of the team and the things they're working on, there's a mismatch there, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Because Apple doesn't want the center of gravity to move towards the web on desktop. On mobile, it's more difficult because the browser plays a different role, right? On desktop, it is increasingly the application environment. And on mobile, it's a place where you go to quickly look something up, get some information really quickly, quickly read an article.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And there's some things that Apple does or doesn't do that makes it more difficult. They don't let you bring keychain passwords over. It's more difficult to check out. And so there are some structural challenges created by Apple on iPhones that make it more difficult.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But I'd say the bigger thing is the role of the browser on your phone is it's almost a different product than what it is on desktop. And that's the thing that we think about the most. But I think as we've seen with ArcSearch, there is a desire if you build something truly new for people to change. And it's just a question of, what is the ceiling there on mobile versus desktop?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I knew you were going to ask this question because you always ask this question. I wish I had a framework. We think of our work as optimizing for feelings and instinct. I don't know if this is a response to the technology industry that I was brought up in, where you're supposed to be neutral and unopinionated and have frameworks. But our approach is, what are we trying to express here?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
What feels right to us? What do we want to do for ourselves and our parents and our siblings and people that we care deeply about? And so generally, of course, We have a data science team. We look at the data. We reason in all the ways that we should. But I think at the end of the day, big decision to make.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I'd say it's more of a personal expression and a personal reflection of our hopes, wishes, and desires for our work than it is anything else.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's worth noting, I think the people at this company are very smart and very well done. I'm not just saying that as what I'm supposed to say. I truly believe that. We hired Darren Fisher, who started Chrome and ran Chrome for 16 years. He worked at the browser company. It's more about, I think, the incentive structure, right? I like to think a lot about incentives.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's one of the things I wish I thought about more earlier in my career. And there's a story that Darren told me that really stuck with me, which is... Chrome had this idea that when you go to the new tab page, one of the most popular surfaces in any piece of software you use, if they show you an icon for the web page that you go to a lot, you might be able to notice it much more quickly.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Oh, it's the Twitter icon. I'll click on Twitter versus just a screenshot of the web page. And they ship that. And overnight, Google search ad revenue dropped by 5%. And they weren't sure why, right? It was this big freak out. Now, that resolved in the way that it did, but that is the sort of thing that you have to contend with.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah, because they don't want you to go to Twitter. They want you to go to search. Now, the Chrome team doesn't. The Chrome team wants you to get to Twitter as fast as you can.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But at a company like Google, in this moment in the public markets, in this moment of AI even more, there are these incentives with the search ad model and the way that Chrome and the search ecosystem work so far that are just a huge... It's inertia. So... It's not just the shipping the org chart that having worked at Facebook, there are real challenges there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But I think on top of that, there is the incentive structure of how the company makes money and has for a long time. And then there's also the risk. I mean, if you think about it, if we start with a blank page, if you give me the most generous reading of everything I said. It may not work. And if it does, we'd only need it to work for 100 million people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
If we do something radically different and we find 100 million people that love what we do, that is a raging success. For Google, that's an utter failure. And that's if it goes right. So I think there's also the risk aversion to the scale they need to hit, the number of people it needs to work for to be worthy, putting aside all of the product risk that comes with doing something truly new.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Candidly, the way I think about it is... there's more pressure on them not to do anti-competitive practices or things that can be perceived that way. And so I think there are a lot of subtle things that these players do that make it harder for an upstart like us to compete. So I would say it's less a specific decision, but these are all big in their own right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And more generally, there are eyes on these companies not to do things that are monopolistic or perceived to be monopolistic. And that culture and climate, I think, is advantageous to people like us. Do you think the Department of Justice should go break up Google?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Come on, Neil. You're a lawyer. That is way above. I'm just asking. That is way above.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Maybe this comes back. $20, Josh. Maybe I should have a framework for optimizing for this stuff, but at the end of the day, I just want my day on the internet. I'll go to $100. At the end of the day, Eli, I want my quality of life on the internet to be much, much better.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Is there a default? The default currently is Google. You got to make a phone call, man. The money's on the table. That may or may not change soon. The default or the money? The default. Okay. No, we are not going to, if we take money for the default search engine, then ultimately our customer are search engines and advertisers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Oh, it's so fun. I was hoping you'd go easier on me, but I was told that it's absolutely not true.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And that is conflicting to why we started the company, what we set out to do. However, I do think one of the things that is very exciting about this moment in AI is alongside of the challenging things is AI has this ability to route us different places more intelligently and take us more directly to places we want to go that are not always Google. And oftentimes it's never Google.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so we're going to replace the default search engine, but not with another search engine that's, you know, one example I like to think of is I just moved to a new place in Brooklyn and I was trying to decide if we should buy a HomePod. Valerie and I love to dance around the house and we didn't have a speaker. I want to type in the Verge HomePod review. If I hit enter, that takes me to Google.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
In our 2.0 product, if you hit enter, that'll just take me to the Verge's HomePod review. So there are things that we can do in this moment that weren't possible before that I think makes Google vulnerable both in search and browsers. That means this question of default search engine is no longer just going to be Google versus Bing and who's going to pay you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It can be, let's take you to the exact right place based on what you're looking for. So you're building a search-alike functionality. Yeah. Again, it may sound tired, but the way we think about this is, what are the things you need to do every day? There are these new technologies that make it more possible to blur the lines between what is a browser, a search engine, an application.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
into something that more holistically end-to-end helps someone do something. And yes, as part of that, when you type in the most popular text box on your computer, we can now take you and route you to lots of different places that oftentimes are much more direct and on the nose for what you want.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Well, it's great to be here. I think I've probably listened to almost every Verge cast and Decoder interview episode for the past few years. Oh, you're ready.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And don't just funnel you into the Google ecosystem because that's how it's always worked and because that's what their business model is.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yes. Again, you're getting me in a mode where I'm sharing more than I should. But we have this internal prototype I tried last week where my son had his first day of preschool today. They sent us a PDF, which I opened in my browser, with all the different dates for holidays and whatnot. And I could say in one gesture, add all of these to my calendar. And it would do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so what we're doing is building the layer underneath all the applications to understand what is going on in your life. What are you looking at right now? What have you been working on previously? And the connective tissue between all of the applications and tabs that you use and rely on. And on top of that, we can take a lot of busy work like that off of your plate much more easily.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And sometimes that'll come through command T and I'll ask it. And other times, if I'm on Apple looking at a HomePod, we might say, hey, you really like The Verge. You read The Verge a lot. Here's the HomePod review.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So I'm using the text box as, yes, the most popular interface, but I think it should feel like your entire experience on the web is more personalized and more proactive to you, not just when you explicitly ask for something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
The first thing is, we really think about right-sizing AI. There's a lot of discourse about AI right now, and it tends to be of the martini-sipping version where... we're going to replace teachers and doctors, and there's going to be this super intelligence being, and that's, in our opinion, not the right way to think about this stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I think the equivalent there as it relates to clicking is you're going to tell the computer what you want to do, and it's just going to go do a bajillion things for you with 100% accuracy. Today, that's not possible. That's not how it's going to work. But what is possible is in these small ways, again, saying, add these to my calendar. We can do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And we can do that with close to 100% reliability. Our approach is as much as possible, which is increasingly very possible, especially on high-end MacBooks, doing that on device. Data does not leave your device. It's all done locally.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And when it can't be done locally, making sure that the person says, hey, I'm okay with that trade-off of sending the contents of this PDF to a LLM provider in order to add it to my calendar and let them make that decision. But I think the large point here is what we are not saying is the robots are going to do all of your work for you. That is not our belief.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But what it can do is it can save people from a lot of the mundanity that relates to futzing around with boxes on the internet all day.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
set of use cases from what arc search is doing absolutely in fact arc search was really a first prototype there's so many things that i wish we'd done differently and i we've now since learned but really it's just that was the first experiment of this larger idea of us playing with this new play-doh which is okay we can click on things for you we can read things for you we
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Wow, we definitely can't. The writing's really bad. Oh, but interesting. We can transform one type of data format into another type of data format, just feeling out the edges of what it can do today. And as part of that, one small thing that you do is you want to find out a quick answer to something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You know, I got a skirt state the other day and the guy at the butcher was like, you should make chimichurri sauce. I don't know how to make chimichurri sauce. Sometimes I want to know that. A lot more frequently, there's something for my job or my livelihood where I got to go click a bunch of buttons in the same order every single time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You know, I think we're much more excited about doing that sort of busy work for you because candidly, that's what people complain about the most when we interview them about their jobs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
No. And I think this is a really complicated one, so I want to try to share both sides. And let's take it head on. That's part of the reason I'm here. From the perspective of an individual, I want the chimichurri recipe. I show up to the website. I got 17 trackers tracking me all of a sudden. I get a newsletter pop-up saying, do you want to subscribe to our newsletter?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I wade through five paragraphs about the author's grandmother and the history of her chimichurri recipe. And all the way at the bottom is the recipe. That doesn't feel good to the individual. It feels like we can do better.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And it feels like for pretty much everyone that uses the web, a much better thing would be, I want to know the ingredients and the recipe steps, get it to you as quickly as possible. And on the other side, it breaks the model of the web historically. Now, I think we are not going around any paywalls. We are not training our own models.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
A lot of the stuff that I think is more problematic is not anything that we do. But I do think it's fair to say that those trackers, as much as I feel like they're unfair to me as an individual, are part of how that recipe site makes money. Right. And the fact that they show ads, which if we are reading the sites on your behalf, you're not saying it breaks that model in some way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so this is a moment where I'm an optimist. I think it's a very exciting moment for publishers and media companies because for the first time, so much of this is dictated by Google and the way that Chrome and search has worked for so long. And so. I think something's got to change. I think publishers got to get paid.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
What is Arc? The browser company is making a web browser called Arc, which the simplest way to explain it is The Verge called it the Chrome replacement that they've been waiting for. So don't take it from me. David Pierce called it. I just want to be clear. David Pierce said that. Arc is the best browser for laptop people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I wish I had an easy answer for you, but I definitely don't think it's sustainable. Even if I also think for the individual, we got to do better as well. It's September.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yes. As recently as last week, I had a conversation with David at The Verge, and he gave me, you know, I thought we were doing a good job of citations. He read me the right act on the fact that we weren't. And in the app today, we have citations even more prominently than I thought was the most prominent app out there that shows what we read. Put them at the top. You can click them easily.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We're also having a bunch of conversations with media companies right now. Like at the end of the day, I think media companies need to get paid and publishers need to get paid. And I think the truth is, as you know, the scale of that will not mean that it works for everybody, but we are trying our best behind the scenes and out front to be better here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Candidly, one of the challenges we have is we don't have the scale of other players in the space. So if we show up at... a media company's website and say, hey, let's figure something out here. Let's figure out how we can pay you. We don't always get the same receptivity as what I assume other companies do. But I'm curious what you think about the open AI model for this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Because we're kind of seeing this all from afar. But yeah, I think what I come back to is, I've been on the board of Patreon for five years, and I think you know better than anyone. I don't think the old model was working for anyone, even before all this AI stuff. I think you make a great point that accelerates it and it hurts it, but I think the old model wasn't working.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And what I do think this new technology provides is a way for all of us to rethink everything from the products themselves, the media products, the software products, all the way to the business models. And I'm curious for Vox how you've thought about that and how you think about it in the context of OpenAI and these publishers that are doing that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
If you're someone whose livelihood is clicking and clacking on your keyboard every day, we make the best browser for you. It keeps you focused, organized, and increasingly we want to do your busy work for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
The other thing, too, is we talk about the web or publishing like it's one big category. But, you know, for example, if you go to a local restaurant in my new neighborhood and they have a reservation booking tool, I'm sure they are totally fine with the idea that an AI system might come around and make a reservation more easily for people. Right. So that one's easy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And then I really believe what you or Ezra Klein said on that podcast about this idea of a flight to quality. I've never listened or engaged with The Verge more. And I predict that across mediums, TikTok, podcasts, I think that will only continue.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And my hunch is that things like Browse For Me or OpenAI or Perplexi, that's not going to replace the HomePod review that I rely on before making a purchase. I'm very bullish on that. I'm curious if you're not, but I am very bullish on that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
There is this middle tier of content and content providers that we might call quick facts or more commodity type content, where candidly, as you know, most of those or some large percentage of those are content farms, or they're contractors that are just churning stuff out, or copying stuff, or AI generate.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think it's that middle layer, that middle layer of, I want to know what Sauvignon Blanc tastes like, because I don't know anything about wine, but I'm at the wine store. That, to me, is the tricky one. I think The Verge is good and going to be better. No, but I truly, truly believe that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so I think in many ways, Casey's revulsion comment, obviously that hurts and it hits, especially after speaking with him. I think it is fair in many ways, but I think it really hits on one percentage of the content that I'm optimistic for what will happen to media at that end of the spectrum. But maybe that's ignorance. But again, I'm curious from The Verge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
My assumption is this Decoder podcast, I would bet that the ad slots are sold out for the rest of the year. I think so.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah. So the origin of the browser company is I was a political appointee in the Obama White House. And after the election, I was personally devastated by the results. And I felt like technology and the technology industry had an impact on the things I didn't like. And I was very motivated to try to do something about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah. Again, and maybe I'm just too much of an optimist, but I think that it's going to take creativity and dreaming on both sides. I think from a media standpoint, tell me if you think this is wrong. I think a lot of media organizations made the mistake maybe a decade ago of trusting the platforms. Yeah. And in many ways, outsourcing their product development.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I don't think media companies are going to make that mistake again. And I think there are many like The Verge that are innovating on what their product is. And they're innovating on what their product is in a moment where there is actually leverage to go after these, you know, I can't overstate, not to you, but to your audience, how stuck the web has been.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And all of these things have been for decades because Google controlled it all. And for the first time in decades, there is this technology, this Play-Doh, that gives a window to mess that up.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yes. At a moment where you all have been burned as media companies by outsourcing your product to Facebook and go say, hey, trust us. Just give us your content. We'll pay you. It'll be great. You're not going to make that mistake again. You have Play-Doh to play with. You are innovating on product. And I think on our side, I knew coming on this podcast, you were going to ask these questions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I knew I wasn't going to have a perfect answer, but I think this is important for the same reason I think it's important to pick up David's call, hear him kindly yell at me, and make changes based on it. And it's why we show up at media companies' offices saying, hey, let's collaborate on something here. Let's figure out a way where we pay you. It's going to take experimentation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It's going to take collaboration on both sides. And I think that collaboration bit is the hardest bit because there are bits of what Casey said that I found deeply unfair. And there are bits of it that I found fair. But I know where he's coming from because it's the same part of me that was burned as a 20-year-old by these promises of tech's going to change everything.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so I think we have the moment in history, which we should not take for granted. We have the Plato, we have the lessons from the past, and now we just got to dream a bit and come together in some way. And maybe this is the part of me that makes decisions through feelings and this is naive and I will, but I truly, truly think something good is going to come out of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And my takeaway was, if you are not an operating system, if you are not a platform by which your applications and content sits on top of, you don't really have leverage to change, for the better or worse, the way that society uses technology. So I decided not to start a company and do something else. And then it was in 2019.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But I think we're going to mess some things up. Everyone's going to mess some things up and we just got to, we got to be open about it and talk about it. And I think there is this generation of entrepreneur, both in the media space and
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
and in the product space or the technology space that has seen, again, the models that came before it and what went wrong there and is encouraged to come on a podcast like this, even if it's not always going to be effortless.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Oh, I think very low. I think very low. I will need media training from you after this. As someone that is full of ideas and prototypes and we have an experimental culture, there's nothing I want to do more than blurt out all of these ideas for what might turn it back. I think I need to learn my lesson of the folks that came before me and say, I don't know the answer yet.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It is hard to imagine looking at the state of things today, as we've spoken about. But I think there is some innovation on the product side, both from the media side and the technology side, that can turn those tides. Because I think, again, from the Patreon perspective, everyone is burned. Everyone is overwhelmed. They are burnt out. It is just not sustainable.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I think out of that will come a generative creativity that can bring it back. And I think the truth of these other historical platforms is They have these taxes, and they have these anti-competitive behaviors. They have these things that I think will work against them. And the web has a lot going for it. So if it's OK, can I ask you one question? Sure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
A birdie told me that of your Verge cast hosts, David Pierce uses ARK. Alex Granz uses ARK. Nilay Patel does not use ARK. Why don't you use Arc, and what can we do better?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
We're having a conversation about the future of the web, and you're still on Chrome?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Well, more than that, I hope out of this, I hope there is some sort of collaboration we can do. Jim Bankoff, or whoever your CEO is, if you're listening, let's do something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
My wife works in the art world for a 76-year-old artist in Flagstaff, Arizona. And I was noticing that she never left Chrome. She was on this high-powered MacBook Air and never left the confines of Chrome. And so the original observation of the browser company was actually our operating systems in 2019 then and definitely in 2024 today are actually our web browsers for laptop people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You're sitting in applications in a browser. Your files are now URLs too. And so the kind of founding insight of the company was, wait a minute, browsers were designed for the information highway. They were designed when the web was a publishing platform. That has changed. Browsers have not. Why is that? Spoiler alert, money. Can we make your quality of life on the internet better?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So you are correct in that relative to the origins of the web and the origins of browsers, people are not spending as much time with content as they are with opening their browser and doing their work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yeah, it's a great question. And I actually think this is where Google deserves a lot of credit. I think if there's one thing Chrome and the Chromium team specifically has done a fantastic job of is building an operating system or an application platform that developers love, generally speaking, and they make it more and more powerful. And in fact, you had Dylan Field on this podcast.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Figma would not exist if it weren't for Google and Chrome and Chromium making the web fantastic for application platforms. What we're focused on is the individual and the person at the other end. So what we think about is
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
The focus on developers and the focus on publishers, as Google describes them, has left the individual, you know, Tuesday at 2 p.m., lacking a lot of powerful tools to make them better and faster. So, of course, we have integrations with different third-party application developers. I would love if we could offer stuff that makes them love Arc more.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
But, in fact, we think that what was missing was looking at my wife using her laptop on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Wait. That's what she's doing. Like, we can do better. Computers can do more than that. So that's the orientation we take to our work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
To be honest, it was an intentional decision, but it was a little decision. And for better and worse, the theme of my answers in this podcast will probably be we come back to the individual at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
If there's one thing they want from their rendering engine, if they're familiar with what a rendering engine is, it's that their web apps work. So for example, for whatever reason, we have a lot of teachers and people in education using Arc. A lot of software at school districts are optimized and actually only work in Chrome-based browsers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
So it was intentional in that we wanted to make sure we could strip out a lot of the kind of tracking and nefarious parts of Chromium that at least don't align with our values. But once we realized we could do that, we thought, hey, Almost every website will work on this rendering engine. We want to make your day better at 2 PM.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Let's jump to that part, to the end person facing part of the software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I honestly don't think I understand the question.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Yes. To be totally honest, I regret many of those words. I wish we didn't have so many new concepts. And I think it's too complicated of a piece of software for many people. And I think we have to make it a lot more simple. But where it came from was... wait a minute, if you look at someone's tab bar and they have 50 tabs open and they're really teeny tiny and there are a lot of duplicates, why?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
You don't need five versions of the same Google Doc. How can we solve that problem? And so most of the new concepts came from the perspective of what is broken, what is wrong with the way people use their browsers today, and can we invent a way to alleviate that problem?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so what that led to, for better or for worse, was a lot of small features and a lot of small ideas that make your day just a little bit better, save you a couple clicks, that I think has built a very cult-like following in the software, but has made it a bit too unapproachable for the average person in that it is a lot of new ideas.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And that's part of what we're working on now is how do we strip away a lot of the experiments that didn't work or didn't work as strongly as we hoped they would to something a lot more focused and a lot more essential, which right now is focused on how do we do your busy work for you?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Because people, I think, love our features like when you're playing a YouTube video and you click away, we automatically open a picture in PicturePlayer. Or if we notice you have tabs open that you've had open for a long time that you haven't used, let's just tuck them away neatly for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so we're going to be focused on kind of trimming down the product even more and really trying to enhancing the bit that does your busy work for you and has these little moments of delights.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
It feels like you already have the power user problem. The way that we started building this product was through the lens of problem statements. And that's how we ended up with so many different solutions and so many different words. But I think the byproduct of that is four years later.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
I think we have a much crisper understanding for the average laptop person who, again, doesn't know what a rendering engine is and honestly probably isn't reading The Verge and isn't an early adopter. What are the most painful, annoying, tedious parts of their day on the internet where if we just focused on them... they'd say, wait, I want that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I do think as much as there are some things that may be power usury, there are other ideas in there that you talk to 10 out of 10 people in this demographic and they go, yeah, I have seven windows and 87 tabs and it's a mess and it's chaotic and I feel overwhelmed. And so we're going to be focused on trying to build an antidote to a few specific problems.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Honestly, it's going better than I expected, but I think we're going to hit a plateau. Because our ambition really is to change the way people use the internet and improve it. And if we really want to reach out to that early adopter crowd, we have to simplify. But I think one of the really exciting things is the most used text box on a Mac is the URL bar in Safari.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so what we've realized is we kind of spread out, and we built all these new surfaces and all these new nouns and all these new spaces. But if we focus just in on a few points that people are familiar with and use a lot, like the text box, like the URL bar, there's a lot of power we can pack in that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And actually, that Verge article shared a lot where, no, people don't really want to manually organize stuff into file systems anymore. They want to tell the computer what they need, and they want the computer to go get it for them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And so I think you'll see us pack a lot of the ideas behind some of our power user features in a much more approachable and familiar interface, which is the command-t text box that you go to all the time to ask for things. Now you can ask for a lot more.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
In the same way that your background as a copyright lawyer informs a lot of the work that you do, I want to take a minute just to talk a little bit about my origin story because it relates to the answer to the question. When I was a senior in college, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was a sociology major.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
And I went to a lecture by a professor named Robert Putnam about his book Bowling Alone. And after the lecture, I went up to him. I said, Professor Putnam, what should I do with my life? He's like, I don't know you, so I have no idea. But if you like my book, there's an entrepreneur named Scott Heiferman that started a company in New York City called Meetup after he read the book.