Ben and Cassidy sit down with The Browser Company to talk about reimagining the web browser—and the way we use the internet. Plus: The best username out there (don’t @ us).
Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser Company
The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.”
For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.
Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.
Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.
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Ben Popper Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I am Ben Popper, Director of Content at Stack Overflow and the world's worst coder, but I'm here with my wonderful and talented colleague, Cassidy Williams, who is pretty good at the programming and also the CTO over at Contenda. Hi, Cassidy.
Cassidy Williams Hello! I'm excited to be here today.
BP You and I spend a lot of time in our browsers. Not everybody does– some people are on their tablets mostly, some people are on their phones mostly, but you and I live in a laptop/PC/browser world, and recently I've been seeing more and more stuff on social media: folks calling out a new experience from the aptly named Browser Company, and they have a browser called Arc, just talking about how amazing it is, how it's sort of a modernized rethink of what a browser should be. Cassidy, I know you were familiar with it. Have you used it or are you hearing stuff about it?
CW I haven't yet. I think I'm on the waitlist still, but I've heard so many good things about it. Every single person I know who has played with it is just like, “This is changing the internet,” which I don't know how, but that sounds cool.
BP All right. Well, we are lucky enough to have two folks from Browser with us today: Victoria, aka VRK, who is an engineer over at The Browser Company, and Dustin, who is Head of Design. So to the both of you, welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast.
Dustin Senos Thank you.
Victoria Kirst Thank you. So excited to be here.
BP So full disclosure, I used to work with a gentleman named Ellis Hamburger, @Hamburger on Twitter.
CW What a great username.
BP The best username. He went over to Snapchat for a while and then to Browser, and so we connected to hook this up. But from both of you, I would love to hear sort of a little bit about your career path. How'd you end up in technology? What did you do before this, and what brought you to Browser Co in your current role?
VK All right, so I feel like to best understand my career you have to also know my age: I'm 35. Why this is relevant is because when I was interested in technology first came from actually right when the internet was starting to be a thing. So I had Net Zero at home, it was dialup internet. And as a teenager I would get up at 4 AM to use the internet while the phone was not being tied up because it was dialup. Anyways, to give context, as a teenager I was very into anime, very into anime websites and that was sort of my first exposure to wanting to create technology where I was like, “Oh, wow. These anime fan sites, I want to make my own anime fan pages.” So that sparked my interest in the web and technology and creating things and programming. I ended up going to University of Washington and studied computer science. I actually specialized in operating systems and so after graduation I went to Google and I worked on Chrome. It was early still, so it was like 2010. It still was not the predominant browser at that time. So I worked on Chrome for four and a half years, and since then I've bounced around. I was at Google on Maps and VR for a little bit and then did a year of teaching at Stanford and have been in startups for the last four years, two of which have been with Browser Company.
BP Very cool. Yeah, I will say I am from the same generation. I was Prodigy before I was AOL. I still keep my AOL screen name as my most frequently used username because it's rarely taken.
VK Nice.
CW So you don't have an embarrassing username from your childhood. That's pretty good.
BP I tried to mash up Seinfeld and Zorac who were my two favorite characters at the time, but I misspelled it so it's a malapropism of those two.
VK Oh, wow.
CW Also Victoria, I have to ask before we go on, what's your favorite anime?
VK Oh, gosh. Okay, I'm not prepared for that.
CW On the spot!
BP One of your favorites.
VK Right now I love Mob Psycho 100. It's so cute. It's very good. It's by the same creator as One-Punch Man, which actually I have not watched that. But yeah, my partner and I are watching Mob Psycho 100.
BP When I Google it, one of the first things that people ask is, “Is Mob Psycho the best anime ever?”
VK Wow, wow. Okay, I chose a good one.
CW Ohh, there you go.
BP So Dustin, how about yourself? Give us the flyover.
DS Yeah, so I too am from the same era. I'll call it maybe the dialup era. I was very obsessed with Lego and building stuff with Lego as a kid and then got a Pentium 75 I think was our first family computer, and got very into being like, “Wait, I can build stuff on a computer.” I followed that interest for a long time. I really gravitated to the technical stuff. I used to work on motorcycles and I continue to work on cars, just really technical stuff, and decided to go to art school to round out my technical side. So I studied 3D animation, did a few years of that, and then cut my teeth at an agency, got into Flash pretty intensely. That brought me to Walt Disney where I led the engineering team for the game engine of Club Penguin which was really fun. It was a very, very fun time. And then Steve Jobs put out that letter that was like, “Flash will never run on the iPhone,” and I was like, “I should work on my resume.” So I ended up moving to San Francisco which was a dream of mine. I had the chance to work at Medium and led the design team at Medium. And through that, I met Josh and Hursh about a decade ago, and then left Medium and then Josh gave me a call and was like, “We're thinking about building a web browser,” and I was like, “That is an absurd challenge. Sign me up, I'd love to work with you all again,” and joined Browser Co in 2020, which has been a blast.
BP So yeah, I guess one of the things that attracted me to this conversation was that browsers are typically these days being created by massive companies. They sort of sit as an extension on an operating system. They come pre-installed and they feel very hard to displace. There have in the past been big actions by the Justice Department all about this kind of stuff. So from both of you, when you heard that was sort of the inspiration of the company, what did you think? What made you think it was possible and what have you found so far?
VK Yeah, okay. So for me personally, as I mentioned, I studied operating systems in school, and one of the things that drew me to operating systems originally was just the fact that so many decisions are arbitrary. Once you learn about how these systems are built you’re like, “Oh, someone just decided that windows are going to look like a rectangle.” It could have been a star or a circle or whatever, but it's a rectangle because we made that decision. And part of what drew me to Chrome originally was also that I love the idea of sort of playing around with what I think of as sort of the primitives of computing when you think of the browser itself as being sort of in some ways an abstraction over the operating system. It's like, “Oh, cool. I get to sort of play with these fundamental primitives.” And so to me, when I got a cold email actually from Hursh about like, “Hey, we're building a browser,” I was like, “Makes sense. Oh, of course. Naturally.” Again, it's weird that there isn't more innovation here because, again, our windows could be stars if we wanted to. We could have tabs wherever. So great, you want to play with that? Finally someone's doing it. That was my personal motivation.
DS For me, I think I have just chased curiosity for a lot of my career. I think curiosity and trying to work with really wholesome good people that are really just fun to work with. And having known Josh and Hursh, both being really good humans, when they reached out and were like, “We're going to build a new web browser,” it just seemed like such an ambitious and wild goal that at first I was like, “I will do a contract to start.” So I did a few month contract and I think I ended my contract halfway and was just like, “Sign me up full time. I would love to apply for a job at this company,” because they'd done such a good job questioning the status norm. And a little bit of the research I had done before I joined was I screenshotted every single web browser I could find. I made them 500 pixels in a Figma file. I just blurred my eyes and I was like, “They all look the exact same.” I wouldn't know which one is which, so there's clearly room for innovation and improvement here. And then when I got to meet the rest of the team, they're all just really interesting, really talented, really cool people and I was like, “If anyone's going to do it, this seems like a good group of people to try.”
CW That's awesome. And so what is different about Arc? For anybody who hasn't had a chance to try it yet, what makes it not the same as all of these little 500 pixel squares?
DS Totally. I think if you were to screenshot and zoom out Arc to 500 pixels and blur your eyes, I think the first thing you'd immediately notice is we have a prominent sidebar. So we've questioned the horizontal tab strip and we've built a left rail of vertical tabs. We've also really taken the approach that you spend so much time inside of a web browser that you should be able to make it feel more like your own so I'd say theming and customization is front and center in Arc. So when people share their screens, my browser, now I'm looking at it, has a gradient of blue to purple across it. It just feels more like mine. So aesthetically it looks very different than other browsers. I think where the other differences are would be more noticeable in use. So we try to notice common workflows inside of the browser, such as making new windows or creating tabs, and try to gracefully intercept and inject optimizations after watching a lot of people use web browsers and try to find opportunities to make things quicker in the browser.
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BP I got an invite link from our good buddy Ellis before we did the podcast and played around a little. I guess the other thing I would say is that it feels centered on a healthy human experience in a way that maybe other browsers are not. You sign up, it immediately says, “Do you want to see ads or not see ads?” and you decide. And then you get in and it says, “Let's take a guided tour. Here's a great place for you to get into a flow state when you need to focus.” It's dropped some tabs in mind, I'm not sure why. Maybe this is personalized or not, but it's like, “Here's a couple of sites where you can look at art and sort of clear your mental palette.” And so all those things feel very different from a traditional sort of browser experience, which is usually, you sign up, you go to a homepage, you've got a bunch of news in a search bar, let's take it from here.
CW So what is the tech stack that it's built in? Victoria, I know you said you have the operating system background, so is it straight up C++ or is it built with other things?
VK Great question. It is not straight up C++, thank god.
CW I was going to say, cool, great, excellent, wonderful.
VK Again, all my respects to C++, it's an important language. But so we actually designed Arc as a macOS app, so it is built on top of Chromium but we essentially pull in Chromium like a library and sort of orchestrate it through calls to a Swift binding essentially. So you can imagine, “Hey, I want to render a web window,” and we sort of ask, “Hey Chrome, can you actually do the heavy lifting there,” and then we're going to be the ones who paint it in macOS Swift land. So yeah, the browser itself is built in Swift and C++, but most of the product engineers are working in Swift code. It's a mix of Swift UI and AppKit and we're also using a library called TCA. But you can imagine also we have needs outside of just a desktop client as well, so we also have a web stack as well as a small web presence for that which is a TypeScript, Node, Next.js stack actually. And then other smatterings of things, we're also using AWS, as well as Google Cloud, as well as Firebase. So a lot of stuff going on.
BP Right, right. And so is it optimized for Mac and that experience? Yeah, you're nodding.
VK Yeah, yeah, it is. We have built for macOS first, I think for many reasons, including just as you mentioned, if you are any sort of startup trying to compete with the big players and browsers, if you can minimize the surfaces where you have to compete on, you can get more faster. So we've been focused on macOS first but we're having efforts in windows as well as mobile happening now.
BP Very cool. Yeah, I used to joke that the only time I opened Safari was once a year to watch the WWDC Keynote. So it always lived there, but it didn't get a ton of use. So seems like it might be ripe with some greenfield there.
CW Yeah, and I'm on a PC now and switch between PC and Mac regularly, and so I'm patient and I can wait. I'm very excited to try it.
BP So one of the things that I guess has come up is talking about operating systems. From a sort of philosophical and then a more practical level, to what degree do you want Arc to act like a web browser versus an operating system? One of the other things I noticed that was different when I got it running was that it wanted me to integrate things like Google Calendar and Slack and Spotify or Figma, the latter two of which I probably use as desktop apps and the other two I use as tabs. But to have them feel more like a widget or an app that's constantly open in that left hand rail of the browser and I can just sort of mouse over and change what I'm listening to or mouse over and look at the file, mouse over and see if I have an upcoming event. So in that sense, are you viewing the browser more like an operating system within an operating system, or like the GUI that people will use for all of their needs on the computer, not just browsing the web?
DS Yeah. Super, super interesting question and a conversation we have quite a bit. And I think what we have noticed is people spend a lot of time in their browsers and get a lot of work done in their browser. If you’re at a WeWork or a coffee shop and you quickly glance at people's screens, almost everyone is sitting inside of a web browser doing actual work. So in some essence, the browser is acting as an operating system for people at a layer. Our CEO put out a video called the internet computer, which he goes into depth about his stance on this, where the web browser can live and where we should try to take Arc. As we have built Arc it has been interesting seeing where we fit in the world of the website and the OS. I think one thing that comes to mind is keyboard shortcuts. We're like, “We have a lot of features. Let's connect keyboard shortcuts to them,” and then we're like, “Sweet, what's available?” And you’re like, “Oh, that's taken by macOS. Oh, that's taken by the website.” We're like, “Sweet. We sit in the middle of this and there's not much green space on either side.” So it has been a really interesting design challenge to live in that space and try to figure out how are we a nice player for macOS as well as the website and respecting that a lot of people do spend time and treat their browser as almost their operating system. So I think the more powerful we can make that for people, the more people don't have to switch between desktop apps and the web browser.
CW The browser basically is an operating system at this point because, I mean, you see Chromebooks and everything where it's basically just a web machine. And there's so many APIs available now just in the browser that are standard now where you could build a pretty dang robust application that normally you would need a full-on machine to run, but it can happen in the browser now. And so treating it as an operating system I feel like is the way that most applications should be going anyway.
BP One of the things that has been taking up a lot of the conversation in the software industry over the last few weeks and months has been the rapid development of artificial intelligence. It feels like the browser, as you mentioned, has not lost any prominence in terms of where people spend their time, but there is a subset of folks who are increasingly spending their time in an IDE or a chat interface, often on a web browser, communicating with a pretty intelligent computer system. Does Browser Co have a perspective on that?
VK I think right now the technology's interesting but it's not our focus right now. It feels like we are in a good position for when I guess all these AI APIs and whatever are a bit more developed. I think there are natural integrations you can think of, especially with where the browser sits in relation to all of these applications. At the same time, there's also a ton of open questions around things like data privacy as well as just performance and ethics. There's a lot of stuff going on in the AI space, so it's not top of mind as what I would say. We're aware of it, but it's not top of mind.
CW What is something that you're really looking forward to people experiencing for the first time in Arc?
DS That's a really interesting question; I've never thought about that. I think maybe it goes back to what Ben mentioned. I think we are trying to take the most human-centered take on the web browser, whereas a lot of other web browsers go, “Open it, we want you to search, we want you to enter that search box. We don't want to remember where you've been. We want you to search because that's where we make our money.” Where we’re going, “You know what? Let's build the best browser for the user.” So I hope that when someone uses it, they can feel that this thing has been built for them. This thing has been built for the tasks that they have on hand. And then for the folks that used to have the tab strip that just eventually became favicons and then they would just close the window–
CW That's me!
DS From the facial expressions, there might be a few folks on the call that are that way. But hoping that with using Arc you just feel this experience of just, “Oh, tab clutter is gone. I don't need that many tabs.” Arc automatically cleans up tabs for you at a set interval, so you can kind of wake up in the morning and have a clean slate. And I think it gives a lot of people just a feeling of relaxation. I hope. I hope that's what people experience.
BP No, definitely. That was what really stuck out to me and I thought was intriguing, as well as kind of what we discussed, the ability to sort of feel like the browser is now a more flexible work campus that can allow me to avoid a bit of the context switching by having my apps kind of plugged in there. So I guess to that question of let's not go to the search bar, and when I first load it up it says do I want ads or not, are you able to speak a bit to the idea of where you would go with the business model? Is this something you hope people will feel so passionate about and get such a differentiated experience that at a certain point there'll be a membership and they would pay to use it?
DS Yeah, so I think instances we've looked to for potential business models would be places like Notion or Slack where there is a free tier for casual users and then perhaps a paid tier for business users. I believe that will be the path we will probably follow. It is very much in the fabric of the company to never be like, “Let's just sell people's data.” That is absolutely not what we're into doing, so we will not go that path. I believe, and I think the world is shifting to this, people will pay for good products. So I think our first goal is, “Let's make an exceptional product and let's get people using it.” And then if you're using it for work or whatnot, it seems like a good opportunity to ask people to pay it back and pay us to support the development of it.
BP Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I, at least within the worlds that I've been working in for the last few years, it's clear that there are people who care more about data privacy than almost anything when it comes to the browser, certainly the case for the Stack Overflow community end users, and that if you kept a lean team, it wouldn't require you to have the market share of one of the bigs. You could have 100,000 true fans and start building a great business and then kind of go from there.
DS Totally.
CW It's been great talking with you both. I'm very hyped about all of this because I feel like there is a lot of innovation to be had in the browser experience in general, and so I'm excited that you're building it.
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BP All right, everybody. It is that time of the show. Let's shout out a member of the Stack Overflow community who came on and helped spread a little knowledge. Today we are shouting out Todd, who was awarded the Lifeboat Badge for saving a question with a great answer. “How can I name an @Service with multiple names in Spring?” Todd has got you covered and has helped over 10,000 people, so thanks, Todd. I am Ben Popper. I'm the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter @BenPopper. You can email us with questions or suggestions, podcast@stackoverflow.com. And if you like the show, do me a favor, leave us a rating and a review. It really helps.
CW I'm Cassidy Williams. You can find me @Cassidoo on most things, and I'm CTO over at Contenda.
VK I'm Victoria Kirst, an engineer at The Browser Company. You can find me @HeyVRK on Twitter or VRK on GitHub. And if you want to try Arc, go to arc.net and sign up for the waitlist.
DS Hi, I'm Dustin Senos. You can find me most places @Dustin.
CW Well, thanks both of you for being on the show. It's been great.
DS Thank you so much. This was fun.
VK Thanks so much!
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