Arc Search
4 of 5 Stars
Surprisingly, I like the mobile Arc browser better than its desktop counterpart. And it is a browser, despite the name...and despite an intro that makes you try out an AI-powered "Browse For Me" search-to-summary feature. (It's kind of weird, but it's probably better than the ones showing up at the front of a Google search these days.)
Arc has a much simpler visual design than Firefox, Chrome, and their major derivatives. It does the main things you want to use a mobile browser for and mostly stays out of your way. There's an ad blocker built in. Like the desktop Arc, it can automatically close tabs you've left open for a while.
I particularly like the open tab list: it's built like the system's open app list, and there's just something satisfying about flinging a page away when you're done with it!
Limited Sync
Sync only sends open tabs, and only one way: the mobile browser can pull tabs from your desktop browser, but there's currently no built-in way to send a page from your phone to your desktop. Or even to another mobile device.
You can share it to any other app on your phone, of course. I've used KDE Connect to send a page to my desktop, and saving to Pocket or Wallabag to re-open a page on my tablet.
Problems (or lack thereof)
So far the only problem I've run into with it (aside from the one-way sync) is oddly specific: The Pixelfed app can't log in when Arc is the default browser. Just that one. Other apps with OAuth logins are able to use it just fine. Well, that and the one video conferencing site I have to use on a semi-regular basis that doesn't work in anything other than brand-name Google Chrome.
I haven't even had any issues with filling passwords from KeePass2Droid, which Vivaldi sometimes blocks with its own autofill.
The AI Question
I look at anything marketed as "AI" with suspicion. At least Arc's approach is to look for something it might be useful for instead of just grafting a chatbot onto a web browser like Opera, Brave, and sigh now Firefox. But using "Browse For Me" still sends your search queries to OpenAI for processing.
— Kelson Vibber, 2025-04-14
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