The Browser Company makes another browser, and it’s not called Arc.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: The Browser Company builds a browser that it thinks can make your online life more organized, less user-friendly, and maybe even more fun. It has new ideas about tabs, and what your browser can do for you.

I’ve heard this story before! But the browser that Browser Company CEO Josh Miller wants to talk about when he calls me on Thursday isn’t Arc, the product he and his team have been working on for the past five years. It’s not Arc 2.0, either, even though Miller has been talking publicly about Arc 2.0 for a while now. A completely new browser. And for Miller and the Browser Company, it’s an opportunity to get back to building the future of browsers they set out to create in the first place.

A strange thing has happened in the last few years, Miller said. Arc has grown rapidly — users have quadrupled this year alone — but it’s also become clear that Arc isn’t going to be a truly mainstream product. It’s very complicated, very different, very difficult to get into. Miller says: “It’s a very new thing and a change, to reach the number of people we really want to reach.” User interviews and data have convinced the company that this is a power user tool, and will always be.

On the other hand, people who use Arc tend to like Arc. They like the sidebar, they like having posts and profiles, they like all the customization options. In general, those users are already settled on Arc – Miller says they don’t want new features as much as they want their browser to be faster, smoother and more secure. And enough!

So The Browser Company faced a situation that many companies face: they had a popular product that wasn’t going to change the game. Rather than trying to build the next thing to the current thing, and risk alienating the people who like it and never reaching the people who don’t, the company decided to build something new.

Arc is immortal, says Miller. He says over and over, in fact, even after telling him a YouTube video the company just released sounds like something the company says. on the right before they kill the product. That the Arc won’t change much. It will receive stability updates and bug fixes, and there is a team at The Browser Company dedicated to that. “In that sense,” says Miller, “it feels like a perfect product.” Most of the team’s energy and time will now be devoted from the beginning.

“Arc was essentially a front-end, tab management innovation,” Miller said. “People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it started to slow down and it started to crash a lot, and we felt bad, and we had to learn how to do it quickly. And we’ve lost the idea, somehow, that we have to make part of the operating system. “

The plan this time is to build not just a different browser interface, but a different kind of browser altogether – one that’s more functional, more powerful, more AI-focused, more consistent with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or “the computer of the Internet,” or any other metaphor you like. The idea is to turn the browser into an application platform. Miller still wants to do it, and he wants to do it for everyone.

What does that look like? Miller is vague on the details. The new browser, which Miller intimated could launch as soon as early next year, is designed to have zero switching costs, which means among other things it will have horizontal tabs and fewer views about the organization. The idea is to make the “first 90 seconds less powerful” to get more people to switch. Then, slowly, to reveal what this new browser can do.

Miller has a few favorite examples of how the browser can help you get things done, he told me, Decoderand elsewhere in recent months. There is the teacher who spends hours copying and pasting data between business applications; Shopify sellers spend a lot of time looking up order numbers and pasting them into customer support emails. Those are the kinds of things a browser, with access to all your web apps and browsing data, can start doing on your behalf. And with AI tools like the new “computing” feature from Anthropic, that kind of thing is becoming automatic and possible.

Designing a browser that is accessible to everyone and something completely new will not be easy. The Browser Company tried it once, and ended up here. But Miller feels good about building a great browser over the past five years. Now it’s time to get back to real work.