The Browser Company announced today that it is onboarding the first set of users for its Windows client — launching today as a beta version. Users and observers have been demanding a Windows version for Arc, especially after the company made the Mac client available to everyone after being in invite-only mode since 2022.
The company said that it will onboard more beta users throughout the month and will “rapidly” increase the invite roll-outs in January. The company said it had more than 500,000 users on Windows waitlist.
The Thrive Captial backed startup didn’t specify if the Windows client had full feature parity with the Mac client. But mentioned that it is currently working on porting features like Peek (preview of a webpage on hovering) and Mini Arc. So expect some features to be absent at the launch.
Last year, the founders, Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, talked about working on and shipping a Windows version in 2023. And with a few days to go in a year, the company has launched Swift-based browsers on the platform.
The company mentioned that the core team for building on Windows included product engineering lead Alexandra Medway, former VP of Chrome Darin Fischer, and former Facebook engineer and Swift on Windows expert Saleem Abdulrasool. Along with the development, the company is trying to open-source its code for Windows.
Arc browser has had a busy year. In April, the company introduced an iPhone companion app for the browser that makes it easy for users to save webpage pages in various workspaces and access them later from the desktop client. In May, it released a tool to let you tweak web pages and remove some elements such as the user suggestion box on X (formerly Twitter). In October, it finally published AI-based features like file and pinned tab renaming, a summary preview of a page, and access to ChatGPT through the command bar. Later that month, the company released a feature to let users share their folders and spaces and split views with non-Arc users.
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