When I started my new role, I was provided with a nice, new MacBook Pro M3. Up until then, my daily computing life had been firmly rooted in the Linux world—many different flavours of it, running across desktops and laptops, going back decades.

Surprisingly, one of the biggest shifts wasn’t macOS itself—but my browser.

I’ve been using Arc as my daily browser for about a year now. It’s a fascinating mix of thoughtful UX and deeply irritating choices. There are things about Arc that I deeply dislike, but it also brought something new to my workflow that I’ve come to rely on more than I ever expected: the Arc mini-browser.

The Shortcut I Use a Million Times a Day

I live inside Emacs. It’s my editor, my shell, my journaling tool, my task manager—pretty much everything except web browsing and email. But running a close second in my daily usage is Raycast, a spotlight replacement that I’ve tweaked to fit my brain.

One of my most-used Raycast custom shortcuts is a DuckDuckGo search dialog that pops open an Arc mini-browser in the current desktop space. Not a new tab. Not a whole new window. Just a small, context-aware browser instance right where I need it, when I need it.

This has become so essential that I honestly can’t work without it. I can quickly kill the mini-browser, or open the page in the main browser app if I need to reference it later, at length.

The Chromium Problem

Which is why I’m so disappointed by the direction Chromium is heading. As Arc is built on Chromium, the looming changes to extension APIs that impact ad blocking, are a major concern. Once Manifest V3 fully rolls out, many of the powerful, user-friendly blockers we’ve relied on will be kneecapped. That’s not a world I want to browse in.

So, like many others, I’m reluctantly eyeing the exit. I’ll probably have to leave Arc behind. But until something like Zen or another browser offers a mini-browser experience that integrates as seamlessly as Arc’s does, I’m stuck. It frustrates me no end.