Decoder with Nilay Patel
Arc creator Josh Miller on why you need a better browser than Chrome
Mon, 23 Sep 2024
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. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work. We’ve been talking about these topics pretty much nonstop for last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore why he built Arc, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve. Links: Researcher reveals ‘catastrophic’ security flaw in the Arc browser | The Verge The Arc browser is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for | The Verge Arc’s mobile browser is here — and it’s not really a web browser at all | The Verge Arc is getting better bookmarks and search results, all thanks to AI | The Verge Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new | The Verge Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari’s default search engine | The Verge One startup's quest to take on Chrome and reinvent the web browser | Protocol Scenes from a dying web | Platformer Perplexity’s grand theft AI | The Verge Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24011410 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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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.
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