Arc vs. Sigma OS: The Battle for the Future of the Internet

Browsers are the way we access and look at the internet, and two companies are currently racing to revolutionize the way that you and I access the internet.

You saw the title—we're talking about Arc and SigmaOS.
How are they different, which one is better, and which one should you use?

We'll answer all of that in this article. I'll also tell you which one I'm personally using at the moment and about another browser that might be even better. Stick around until the end for that part.

Table of Contents

• Intro

• Arc

• SigmaOS

• Conclusion

Intro

Their main goals revolve around making your time online easier, faster, smoother, and just better, you know? And they're already doing a good job at this. I've been using them for a few months already, and let me tell you, I'm not going back to Chrome, Safari, or any of those old-school browsers anytime soon.

Both Sigma and Arc are really good at taking away most distractions you'd normally see, and they make it so easy to organize your work—it's almost enjoyable.

The first major difference is that Arc is built on Chromium, which should give you access to all your Chrome extensions, while Sigma is built on WebKit, which should make it crazy fast. But let's talk about the speed in a little bit.

Although they're very similar in many ways, they have different philosophies and priorities, which are clearly reflected in their apps. The first thing you'll notice is that they both got rid of the top bar navigation with all the messy tabs and bookmarks. You'll instead be navigating using a super clean sidebar on the left and a sort of shortcut-activated search bar that pops up, which I absolutely love. Your tabs are neatly organized on the left side and can be grouped together to make it easier to navigate and organize.

Arc

Let's start with Arc.

It's just silky smooth and feels super polished. Look at this video player: the second you switch tabs, a picture-in-picture video will automatically pop up and follow you around.

It has smart screenshots, which automatically detect the elements on the web page. Once I've taken my screenshot, I can easily copy it, share it, or add it to my Easel.

An Easel is kind of like your private dashboard where you can save all your ideas, texts, images, and much, much more directly inside of Arc. Once I've added a screenshot to my Easel, it keeps the link of where it was taken so I can navigate back to its original website.

This is great, but not only that—you also have live captures inside of an Easel, which is the clear evolution of a screenshot. Think of it like a cropped version of a website, which is live and always up to date, so you can actually interact with the website from within your Easel. Just think of all the crazy live dashboards you can make now.

If this sounds like too much for you, you can always use the notepad, which is inbuilt inside of Arc—because why not?

Another thing you'll love is multitasking with split-screen. You just select a tab from your sidebar, drag it, and boom—you've got a split screen between two tabs, and you can even go up to four tabs if you really want to.

Talking about the sidebar, did you notice how it's organized? At the top, you've got your favorite websites, which will always be there for easy access. You can also pin tabs, Easels, notes, and whatever else to make sure you don't lose them.

Then you've got the rest of your tabs, which you can even group together inside folders. What you might not have noticed, though, is that this whole view is simply a single space, and I can have many of them. I can have one space for my personal things, for social media, for work, for design work, for YouTube, for travel, and so much more.

So the focus here is clearly on organizing your stuff and decluttering.

Another nice surprise is what they call Boosts, which is a fun way to customize websites and how they look. You can change their styles and inject customizations that only you will see, so I guess you can now customize the whole internet to make it look how you want it to look.

You also have Little Arc, which is kind of like a little window you can easily pop up from anywhere on your computer to search for anything online.

But the most powerful thing about Arc is clearly its Spotlight feature, or tiny search bar, that I mentioned earlier. This thing does absolutely everything. Just press Command + T, and it'll be right there for you to search for something, open a new tab, pin a tab, navigate to your browser history, add an extension, search for a setting, or literally anything else you want to do.

Let me just say it right now—you'll never be navigating to boring menus and options ever again. We're done with all that.

And the best part is that it does this everywhere, even when you're on another app. You just use the command, pop your little Spotlight search, and open the mini window ready to go.

SigmaOS

Sigma OS has a very similar feature, which I absolutely love, and it's called Lazy Search. Makes sense, right?

A quick press of the spacebar on your keyboard, and the Lazy Search just pops up. You can use this not just to search something on the internet, but to navigate every single setting and shortcut on Sigma, to find tabs, search through history, open a new workspace, navigate to a new workspace, open the split screen, open a new tab, and so much more. So Lazy Search is clearly about so much more than just search.

The best and craziest example of this is that you can create new things in other apps from here—new tweets, new Google Docs, new Google Slide presentation, new Google Meet call, new Slack workspace, new Figma file, new OpenTable reservation, new Stripe invoice, new Spotify playlist, new Canva projects, new Medium posts, new Discord community, new Notion page—yeah, there's a lot, too many to list.

You've probably already noticed that it has a sidebar on the left as well, but it looks a little bit different, right?

Things here are organized as workspaces, which then contain your tabs. The tabs are almost organized as a to-do list of things you need to check and get rid of. The reason I'm saying this is that you don't actually close tabs in Sigma—you have to mark them as done to make them disappear. You can lock a tab in the workspace if you want to keep it there permanently, and you can even rename it or tag it to make it easier to find. You can also snooze it for a while if you don't need it right now.

Sigma is also obviously great for multitasking, so it has split-screen and lets you easily move tabs across different workspaces. As you can imagine, there are a lot of very nice keyboard shortcuts in Sigma to make your life much easier. It takes a little bit of effort to get them, but once you have them, let me tell you—they're absolutely amazing.

Let's get back to the workspaces for a quick second because these are not just simple workspaces. There are a lot of hidden features here that make Sigma super, super powerful. Different workspaces mean different focuses, right? And so, similar to Arc, I'll use one for my design work, one for YouTube, one for social, one for traveling, one for focus work, and many more. So it just makes sense that each workspace lets you use separate profiles.

But not only that—Sigma is built with collaboration in mind, so it lets you easily invite somebody else to a workspace and share your tabs with them. All of a sudden, my workspace is split between a shared and a private section. All you need to do is drag that interesting article you're reading into the shared section to share it with me.

Obviously, I'm a busy person—just look at me—so in one click, I'll ask Airis, my native AI companion inside of Sigma, to summarize it for me. I can also highlight a word, a sentence, or paragraph and ask Airis to explain it to me in the context of the article or even translate a whole website into another language. But I don't really care about translating your whole article into perfect French—that's boring. What I really want is to rewrite the whole thing as if I'm a five-year-old or Groot, and Airis will do that. Airis will also help me rewrite my tweets and even the description of my YouTube videos because why not, right?

Conclusion

If you've read up until this point, you're probably amazed at these two browsers and everything they do—and I am too. Personally, I'm currently using Arc on a daily basis.

In conclusion, though, both are absolutely amazing pieces of software, and you can't go wrong with either of them. I think the final decision will come down to what is more important to you and what you value in a browser.

Either way, I would strongly suggest you try both before making up your mind.

If you're like me, the most exciting part is setting these things up—so why not do it twice?

Please let me know in the comments if you liked this article, which one you prefer, and if there are other browsers or tools I should look at. I hope you enjoyed it, and see you soon 👋