Some more thoughts on TBC

I know, I know. You’re tired of hearing me ranting about The Browser Company and their Arc “browser”. I’m also tired of reading about them but I keep stumbling on news about this silly company and I can’t help myself from yelling at the screen. They aired a commercial on TV the other day, clearly a reasonable thing to do when you have a product with no revenues and no business model. And not happy with that, they released a YouTube video with the CEO explaining the ideas “hidden” in the commercial and that tells you how good at marketing these people are. If you need to release an almost 5-minute video to explain the meaning of a stupid 1-minute ad you probably need a better marketing department.

Anyway, leaving aside the pointlessness of this whole thing what prompted me to write this post were some of the things the CEO said in the video explainer which are so profoundly stupid that I find them offensive. If you are an ARC user you should be offended too because he must think you’re all a bunch of idiots.

He said in the video that there were three questions he wanted to ask:

  1. What is this internet we want to live within?
  2. What if the web were truly made for you?
  3. What are we here for?

What is this internet we want to live within? What do we want to create for ourselves?

Just to make it clear, what this company is allegedly making is a browser. It’s in their fucking name: The Browser Company. They’re not making a new internet. They’re not creating anything. As I wrote before, they’re not even making an actual browser like the awesome people at Ladybird. They’re building a wrapper around Chrome. This makes the CEO rant about browser monoculture even more hilarious since by doing that they're part of the problem.

In the video, he tries to argue that Silicon Valley companies are driven by efficiency, you type something in Google and he gives you an answer but there are times when you don’t want an answer, you want to get access to the best set of results because you’re after experiences and serendipity and a bunch of other complete nonsense. He asked, “Do we even believe in a single answer?“. The answer is no Josh. No, we don’t. This is why all search engines have a SERP. No search engine gives you one answer.

A lot of other times something just seems really interesting to you and you want to go wide and deep and be surprised there are a lot of other things we might want to optimise for when we’re designing this new internet

Designing this new internet? You’re not designing a new internet. You’re using some algorithm to decide for me which 6 or 8 results I should be seeing. In doing that you’re worse than Google.

The second thing is what would it look like if truly the web was made for you?

I’m gonna ask you a question Josh: how can you make a web for me without profiling me? I’ll wait for an answer the same way I’m still waiting to hear back from your support team on that ticket I opened months ago where I was asking how to prevent your stupid ARC Search from accessing my sites.

You asked “What does the personal web, the personal internet look like” and there are various ways to tackle this question but it certainly doesn’t look like a generated ARC Search result page that is the same for everyone. You said the web doesn’t feel personal because we all see the same stuff and yet you showed a screenshot of your stupid ARC Search pulling in results from Reddit and Trip Advisor. Again, if you’re reading this and you’re an ARC user, they must think you’re a complete idiot to believe all this stuff.

As for the final question, what are we here for and why am I looking at this video, well Josh, I work in tech. I code websites, I care about the web. Especially the independent, personal one. The one you’re ranting about but probably don’t care about at all. I also have to care about your stupid browser because even though it’s Chrome sometimes it has bugs that aren’t present on Chrome and so I have to test on it. I’d love to not care about your browser and your stupid ARC Search but I have to because this is the world I live in. My email is public if you want to get in touch. You probably won’t because why would you, you have nothing to gain from a private exchange after all.