Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc Browser. My VergeCast co-host and Verge editor at large, David Pierce, is a big fan of Arc, and he's written about it quite a bit for us. We'll link his review and other coverage of the product in the show notes. Basically, Arc is a ground-up rethink of the web browser. Most modern browsers started out as document viewers, and they grew to support running complex applications. Arc's main conceit is that it's designed to make running and using all those apps as simple as possible. You'll hear Josh describe it as an operating system several times. Which is a pretty big claim to make, and he and I got into what that actually means for a web browser.
There are some AI tools built into the desktop Arc browser, but the company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of web pages. That puts it in competition with OpenAI's forthcoming SearchGPT product and Google's new AI overviews in its search results. At the same time, it also puts Arc right in the middle of one of the fiercest debates in tech and media today. Whether AI companies and products are boosting content from the open web and then turning around and selling it to consumers without paying the people who produce that work anything at all. We've been talking about these topics pretty much non-stop for the last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore why he built ArcSearch, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve. I also wanted to know how Josh is thinking about competing with Chrome on the desktop and Safari on mobile, and especially how he plans to monetize Arc.
Chrome and Safari are a lot of things, but mostly they're developed by some of the richest companies in the world and given away for free. Josh says the plan is to keep the basics of Arc free, but monetize a mix of customization, automation, and productivity tools that will make users' lives so much easier that they, the company they work for, pay a subscription fee. It's a big idea to bring competition back to the browser market, and the early reception to Arc has been positive. But you'll hear Josh and I go over some of the major challenges the browser company has faced so far, like having to teach people all new sets of metaphors and design languages around what browsers should be doing, and why you'd even want to use a web browser to run apps the way Arc is suggesting. let alone use a new web browser at all.
Of course, Josh and I also got into the controversy swirling around generative AI and whether the web as an information distribution platform will survive plundering all of its pages. Josh was pretty candid here about what he does and does not know about how this all might play out. And I gotta say, he was more open to changing his mind than arguably any tech CEO I've talked to about this subject.
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