If the original Boosts made things ten times easier, Parrott wanted Boosts 2.0 to make it 50 times easier. It's just not that easy.” Boosts 2.0 fixes that in a pretty major way by giving anyone a few simple tools to tweak sites they visit. “You have to know how to code, you have to be willing to dig around in the web inspector and figure out what things are called in the code and stuff like that. “Ten times easier than making a Chrome extension is not really that easy,” Parrott said.

“If you’re the kind of person who likes to tinker with things or a person who makes websites, you probably have all the technical skills to make a Chrome extension, like JavaScript and CSS and HTML,” Parrott said, “and yet nobody makes them because it's just really hard.” And while the original Boosts release put a bunch of tools right in the browser to let you customize sites, it still wasn’t exactly user-friendly for people who don’t know things like CSS. I’ve been testing the Boosts 2.0 release for a few weeks, and while I don’t think it is reinventing the internet, it does open up some fun possibilities.īoosts first launched about a year ago, and product designer Nate Parrott told me the concept was to “make it 10 times easier” to build a browser extension.

It’s called Boosts, which the Arc team grandly refers to as a way to take control over the sites they visit. One of those features is taking center stage in a new update that Arc is rolling out today. A big one is the fact it doesn’t have a bookmarking system like other browsers, and there are a lot of small things that differentiate it from Chrome and Safari.

For example, all the research and documents I need for a particular article live in their own space, and I can jump over to another for personal tabs or a third for keeping an eye on the news of the day.Īrc, which launched a little over a year ago, certainly has its quirks. Like most modern apps, Arc puts everything in a sidebar and lets you build spaces that you can use to focus on a particular task. Years after we all decided that a stack of tabs at the top of a browser window is how we’re doing things, Arc has a different approach. Arc, a Mac-only internet browser from the aptly-named Browser Company, is one of those apps trying to reimagine a core computing tool.

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