Oh for fuck's sake

Why can’t we have nice things?

The Browser Company was so promising, and they created something wonderful with Arc. A new browser with genuinely good new ideas. Vertical tabs, bookmarks that lived like apps or files. Little quality of life improvements. After decades of browsers being completely inert and extractive, someone tried to do something new.

Something the CEO once said that really stuck with me, was his response to the question of why take on someone like Google who could crush a little startup by copying any feature they shipped.

…the truth about web browsers is they are one of the highest margins, most lucrative pieces of software imaginable that power billions and billions of dollars in profit for the world’s largest technology companies. And that is quite an incentive not to change it too much. [Google] views Chrome not really as a web browser, but as a cheap high-leverage way to get traffic for its search engine and search ads. …what that practically means is the team at Chrome can be creative and they are and they can be talented and they are, and they can have dreams of what a web browser can be in the future and they do, but at the end of the day they literally need to A/B test any change to Chrome against what does this do to searches? Do people search more or less after we make this change? And the answer is they always search less because if you add anything to it, it distracts people from typing in that search box, which is the URL bar, the Browser. Credit: https://mothfund.substack.com/p/mm-josh

He recognised and articulated that innovation hasn’t slowed in tech because people are running out of ideas. It’s because the people hoarding the resources are also materially disincentivised to make things better, or even to change them at all for any reason other than to make number go up.

And now, the alkahest comes for Arc.

I’m gonna miss you, buddy.