Surf the browser

A guest's identity

This is a guest post by Micah Blachman, an eleven-year-old writer and tech enthusiast.
He can be reached at micah.blachman@gmail.com

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It was December 4 when I first heard about Deta Surf. I stumbled across the article in The Verge, at a time when I was still trying to fill the browser-shaped hole in my heart after The Browser Company announced that they were moving on from Arc, six weeks prior.

Even just from the two pictures shown in the article, I could tell that Surf would give me the opinionated design that I had found in Arc; an almost magical quality completely non-existent in Chrome. Surf’s website, full of colorful manga-style drawings, showed me that Surf was maintained by a devoted small team.

I looked up Surf, but there were almost no search results, which showed me that I was in on something early, made by a company that wasn’t necessarily trying to appeal to everyone.

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When I first set Surf up two weeks later on an M1 iMac, it asked me if I would like horizontal tabs or vertical tabs, and light or dark mode. Coming from Arc, I was curious how switching back to horizontal tabs would feel, so I decided that I would try those out. The second choice was much easier for me. I’ve never been a fan of dark mode on anything, and so I chose light mode without even thinking about it. Personally, my favorite theme is cream-colored, or a warm off-white, like the option found on Instapaper and Pocket, two read-it-later services. Although Surf gave me choices, the design was still very much opinionated, arguably the most important quality in a well-designed piece of software, something apparent in Arc, and, as I realized, in Surf as well.

A few weeks later, I answered an email asking for user feedback and gave them half an hour of my time on a call with of of their design engineers, Felix Tesche. He was very friendly and happily showed me some features that I hadn’t previously played around with. In return, Su Durakbasa, a 2D Animator working with Deta, drew a manga-style portrait of me from a photo I provided:

Since then, I have had another call with Felix, and it really reminded me how exciting and fun it is to be involved with a niche software program.

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Surf’s approach is one of its biggest differentiators, or more specifically, its contexts feature, which is core to the product experience. Contexts are basically sets of tabs, like groups of interests, that you can easily manage. You can organize a new context manually or use a feature called Smart Context that leverages AI to create and organize a new one.

Sidebar contexts

But Surf’s AI capabilities go even further.

With Surf Notes, you can @-mention contexts, tapping into models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Wikipedia. If you follow the mention with a question, the AI will then give you a response based on the provided query.

Another feature, Ask, lets you chat directly with any webpage or context you're browsing. Interestingly, you can also take a screenshot and ask the AI a question based on what’s shown in the image.

Ask in action

This might lead to privacy concerns, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Surf does most of its processing locally. I’m by no means technical enough to know of all of the privacy concerns, but I trust Deta. After speaking to the team, I feel like there are real people behind it, who I want to trust.

Browsing the Arc subreddit, I get the sense that many people decided not to use Surf just because it is coded in Electron, which is not memory efficient. From my experience using Surf with 16 gigs of unified memory, it runs just fine. Electron shouldn’t be a reason to pass on it. Surf will run on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows, and Linux, so there are no compatibility issues like there were on Arc, which for most of its life, was only available for macOS. Yes, eventually there was a Windows version, but it never matched the feature set of the macOS version.

Surf, to me, feels like a product that, even if its user base grows by orders of magnitude, will keep its niche design and small-company feeling. But then again—I can’t predict the future. At Arc’s peak, I thought it would be around forever.

Even now, in March, Surf is still little known. Aside from the occasional Reddit thread, and this icon mockup (which I absolutely love, by the way), Surf receives very little attention online. I wish more people knew about Surf so that they could enjoy it, but at the same time, I don’t want to spoil the nicheness of it, the same thing that happened to Arc—I want it to continue to flourish as a niche design product.

As Surf is still very much in its alpha stage, there is a waitlist, but it shouldn’t take too long to get in. When onboarding, I would recommend watching the Deta Surf Crash Course, a six-minute video made by Felix outlining the basics. Surf’s website provides some interesting content about how people use Surf, along with a video.

I’m excited to see how Surf compares to The Browser Company’s yet unreleased new pursuit, Dia, and Perplexity’s unreleased agentic AI browser, Comet. I’m waiting eagerly for both, but to me, Surf seems like a product that will stick around in my Dock for a while.

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