Why Darren Fisher of The Browser Company thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser

Darren Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. a Many from web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping to convert that app to Firefox using Mozilla. After that, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into widely successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around a startup search engine. And now it is Leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on it ArchOne of the newest browsers on the market.

Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for over a year, is trying to completely rethink the browser’s user interface. It has a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, offers plenty of customization options, and is meant for people who live their computing lives in a browser (which is increasingly the case for most people). CEO Josh Miller often talks about building an “internet computer” as well, and using the browser as a way to make the internet more useful.

Fisher has been a consultant to The Browser Company for a while, but Monday is his first official day at the company as a software engineer. Before his new party, Fisher and I got a call to talk about why he thinks browsers are worth reinventing — and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it.

The answer begins with the browser’s definition feature: tabs. Fisher doesn’t hate tabs – in fact, he helped spread them. But he hates that using a modern browser involves unlocking a million of them, not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting over. “I remember when tabbed browsing was new, and it helped people reduce clutter because you didn’t have many windows,” Fisher says. But now, “Even when I use Chrome,” Fisher says, “I get a lot of clutter. At some point, I just say, ‘Forget it, I won’t bother trying to sort all those tabs.'” If it matters, I’ll open it again.” Browsers need better systems to help you manage tabs, not just open more of them.

Fisher’s position isn’t entirely controversial, and few disagree with the idea that there must be better ways to organize the browser. But it is really difficult to make changes to any application once it has reached a certain level of scope and maturity. Just look at Safari on iOS, Fisher says: When Apple moved the URL bar from the top of the screen to the bottom, users panicked. “But why was it [Apple] Motivation to do it? Well, you’re on the phone with your thumb on the bottom, not the top. And so you want to access the tabs, the URL bar – having all the controls at the bottom is more convenient. It was better, but it was different, and the difference is bad. The Fisher team at Google once ran a similar test on Chrome, he says, to achieve similar goals. “This change was difficult to make because users struggled to make that change.”

But the more difficult problem, at least for the Chrome team, is that building a great web browser isn’t Google’s only goal. Chrome is in large part to put a search engine front and center, which is what Fisher-Lee describes as a “brick wall” of all kinds of browser innovation. “Anything we did that helps you get back to what you were doing, it means you weren’t looking, right?” Fisher says. Better tab management means less search; Sending you directly to the page you want means fewer search results and fewer ad impressions. Making you close and reopen your tabs all the time isn’t just acceptable for Chrome; It is a victory. Fisher and his team had a lot of UI ideas and new features, but “all of those good ideas are dying off the ground”.

The best way to improve the browser, Fisher eventually decided, is to start from scratch. Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into a single concept that’s similar to an app switcher; It makes it easy to search between your open tabs; It has built-in tools for taking notes and creating shareable mini websites. The experience can be upsetting because it’s so different, but Fisher says that’s part of what he’s passionate about. “These aren’t things that people haven’t talked about before, but actually putting it together and focusing on it and thinking about the small steps that go a long way, I think there’s a lot of opportunity,” he says.

The past two years have seen boom periods for browser enthusiasts in general. Some developers are starting to get fed up with creating apps for each platform and are back to creating web apps, while users are looking for new ways to manage their online lives across devices and platforms. As a result, a number of companies have been vying to replace Chrome and Safari with their own ideas. Brave doesn’t mess with the user interface but tries to rethink the business and privacy models of browsers; the companion Turns the browser into an iPhone home screen-style app switcher; DuckDuckGo builds a desktop browser to align with the privacy-focused search engine. Most of these browsers are built on the same Chromium infrastructure that powers Chrome, which means they can implement new ideas without breaking the web.

Fisher likes to compare the browser to the operating system, which matches the Browser Company’s idea that Arc is not just a browser but an iOS-like system for the open web. “It has a user interface for managing tasks, it has a user interface for creating and starting a journey, but there is a lot in between,” he says. What the iPhone did for native apps, Arc hopes to do for web apps. Fisher says he’s interested in improving the way files move across the Internet, for example, finding a way better than the constant downloading and uploading we all do all day. It likes that Arc has a picture-in-picture mode that works by default, pulling up your YouTube video when you switch tabs. All of this makes the web more connected and cohesive rather than just a bunch of tabs in a horizontal line.

This is, by the way, another idea that is certainly not new. ChromeOS, which Fisher also helped create, was also an attempt to create a desktop operating system from the browser. “But what ChromeOS hasn’t done is reimagining how I experienced the web,” he says. “It’s still just Chrome.” I put a browser on my desktop without really thinking about how the two interact. Google’s other project, Fuchsia OS, had much higher goals — combining Android and ChromeOS into a fully connected, native system — but it’s not finished yet.

Mobile is another place that Fischer says browsers have woefully not served their users with and it may turn out to be a more complex problem to solve. “The experience of using a mobile device is very similar to someone who used the Netscape browser and pared it down on the phone.” Tab management is worse on mobile devices, and there’s practically nothing in the way of tools that help people quickly navigate things and find information.

Despite this, the mobile phone is, in some ways, a more difficult surface on which to make progress. Since Apple and Google have tight control over their operating systems, there is no way to build a Chromium browser and ship it to people’s smartphones. Both Android and iOS are so focused on native apps that they seem to have largely left the browser. But here, too, there is energy in the other direction. As Apple, in particular, continues to shut down the operating system and try to extract more revenue from developers and users, the web is becoming an increasingly useful solution. Microsoft built game streaming that works in Safari; You can pay for apps in the browser without giving Apple 30 percent.

There are a lot of big, thoughtful ideas in Fisher’s head about how to improve browsers and change the Internet in the process, but there are also a lot of fruits that are still hanging out. On mobile, in particular, he says, “there are a lot of chances because the starting point is too old.” He’s vague about the details of his plans – and The Browser Company hasn’t really started work on a mobile browser anyway – but says that’s a huge focus for him going forward.

He says he is eager to find simple ways to make the internet work better for people. We should be able to do a better job of windows full of tabs, right? Fisher uses the phrase “don’t boil the ocean” a few times throughout our conversation while explaining plenty of touch-based ways to make the internet more usable: customizing things so your browser feels like yours; improved sync so you can access all your stuff everywhere; make it easier to find and move between objects; Add more tools so you can take notes or save things without the need for an entirely separate app.

The Browser Company is already working on a lot of things Fisher are interested in. That’s why he says he joined and joined the company as a software engineer rather than a senior CEO. He wants to chat in the code base, to build things himself, as Arc moves from an invite-only Mac app to a cross-platform operating system in the coming months. There are a lot of new ideas in the app, many of them are bad and some of them may change everything. This is a sweet spot Fisher. “There are a lot of challenges and obstacles to Arc’s success, and I’m excited to work on these issues,” he says.

Speaking to Fisher, he clearly sees an opportunity to build the browser he’s been wanting to build for years. With no limitations on Chrome’s market share or Google’s business model and none of the controversies that inevitably come with decades of things doing pretty much the same way, he’s free to try new things in new ways. He had been thinking about some of them for decades.