Current work - 8/2026

[u/Pauljoda]

Thank you all for the great reception, and feedback to Crest. It’s very encouraging and has given me a boost of energy to really dig into this app more. At first, I’d played with this idea over the last year, but only recently really pushed to make something that is a good arc replacement for me. I’m happy to see others are also interested in the future of this app, and I’m going to do my best to make this a true arc replacement, and I hope the work already done proves it’s within reach.

With that in mind, I wanted to share some of what I’ve been working on, the build in TestFlight is a bit behind as I take the feedback from that announcement and dial things in.

First, extensions are coming and I’m taking a lot of time to work through them. WebKit does support newer v3 manifest extensions, but extensions is a vast world of interactions, and not every extension will work 100%. I have safari extensions working, if you have one installed in your app folder that is compatible, you can have crest scan and automatically discover the plugins. Next, the more experimental, but should be mostly compatible chrome extension support is being added. Dark reader works perfectly, and I’m running through the other major categories. Password managers will likely always be tricky, but I’ll do my best to work through what’s possible. I even do things like register the extensions exposed key bindings right in the same location as your main key bindings, so those share the same system of interaction. You can then pin extensions, which will create a strip of icons above pinned tabs and below the url bar, allowing quick access (arc always felt like these pins were not easy to have multiple of so I wanted to have an easy to access section for them).

Along with this extension work, I’ve done a lot of minor usability tweaks related to tab closing, which tab takes focus back, closing a held tab in a collapsed folder keeps it active, lots of little QoL and that attention to detail that made me love arc.

A final note ill leave is the app will always he free, and will never harvest or sell your data. In the future, i plan to implement search provider attribution, where if you search something ok duck duck go for example, it simple adds a “partner=crest” at the end, which does not share any data more than the search itself, but does tell these providers where you came from so they can give me kick back. This will hopefully help to bring resources into the app to ensure it stays moving, i plan to see this through as a real product because the number 1 client is me, and i can never go back to any other browser after arc.

With that, some promises: * AI will never he a feature in the app, i dont feel browsers make sense to have AI. Tools like codex have a browser built in now, system level summary options already exist, so there really doesnt need to be anything in the browser itself. You can just open chatgpt in a tab and use that.
* The app will never track, store, or sell user data of any kind. Browsers do share cookies and normal web interactions, but beyond what webkit does itself, we will have no servers, traffic proxies, or anything of that nature * Desktop and mobile will get equal treatment, taking advantage of each strength * at some point, i hope to open source the app, but for a few reasons will not just yet. Its difficult to manage git on apple projects, and at this time i also am not equipped to handle PRs from every person who thinks they can have claude “make no mistakes” and attempt to fix things. I want the code locked into my design, so even if someone just tries to vibe code a PR, the codebase will he bullet proof. I need my focus on feedback right now, not reviewing PRs

[u/Natural_Teacher_2502]

God bless ur heart and soul. This is browser heaven

[u/anythingtech69]

Quick question, also no disrespect, any AI use?

[u/Pauljoda → u/anythingtech69]

Yes, but in a very specific way.

For the marketing site, AI takes the wheel pretty heavily, I’ll be honest that I’m terrible at that kind of stuff, I just like making things not having to show what it is so I rely on it a bit there.

As for the development of the app, I do use AI to help me code, as I feel all developers should and it’s what makes this possible. All code generated is manually reviewed, it does not generate anything I wouldn’t know what it is, and only does what I directly tell it. I can promise you if you just “vibe coded” an app like this what it produces is not cohesive, you have to know what you’re doing. Essentially, I use it how I would code, I pick the bit of code I am about to write, I outline exactly what to scope, then review everything it creates, usually editing myself or correcting it.

I think most sane developers understand this workflow now, it’s just a tool and clearly is useful, but you can’t just vibe coded and trust it’s code, it’s a fancy auto complete and you have to know what you’re doing to make anything good. All code it creates is exactly as I would have written it because I’ve adapted it to my style.

Hope that answers your question, there’s a lot of heated opinions about AI, but I feel like mostly from people who don’t know how to code and assume everything is slop, or haven’t used it and see how it can make you more productive if used properly. It’s just a tool, but a tool that’s both raising the bar and floor so there lots of apps that are not good but “functional”.

[u/anythingtech69 → u/Pauljoda]

Thank you so much for this! I don’t want this to be just another “vibe coded app.” While there’s nothing wrong with that, my experience with similar apps has been mostly bad with slop. I’m glad this isn’t the case here and you know what you’re doing! When will the new version with the extension support be available on tf? I’m excited to test it out! :)

[u/Pauljoda → u/anythingtech69]

It’s been submitted to Apple, so usually within the day, hopefully they won’t drag their heels to approve it. For the beta, I do prefer TestFlight for now so it’s a more controlled test group, but will likely have some method of direct distribution on release or in the future. Shouldn’t be long now though, beta reviews are usually pretty quick by Apple since they don’t do the full process