Hello friends! Welcome to Installer #149, your guide to the best and coolest things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy. It really feels like falling in now, at least in my neighborhood.), and you can also read all the old editions on the installer home page.) This week, I’ve been reading about Demis Hassabis and computer chips and permafrost, enjoying the first episodes of Machine Gods, filming the next season of Version History (pet season!), watching You Can See Everything and then reading and listening to absolutely everything about it, painstakingly updating all the material on my 1Password, creating tiny documents with Tiny Little Office, watching Conan O’Brien make Subway Takes the same way he once had Hot Ones, finally getting good enough at CapCut and playing The Mandalorian and Grogu soundtracks all day long at work. I also have for you a new AI assistant, the most Duo-y new Duo iPhone app, my search for the next great browser, and much more. Let’s do this. (As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and advice. What are you playing, reading, watching, listening to, or tweaking with Claude this week? Tell me all about it: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it and tell them to subscribe here.) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Obviously, Grand Theft Auto VI is the biggest game release of the year, but a new COD is always a big deal. This doesn’t sound like a huge reinvention of the form, but rather an even more playable and powerful version of what works. I was especially excited to learn that the campaign mode is a big improvement this time around. The Blink Mini 4K. Ring cameras shine a lot brighter, but Amazon’s cheapest brand also makes some pretty good stuff. This is part of a whole new line of devices, but $80 for a 4K camera with two-way audio and lots of smart security features? It’s not a bad deal. Just watch TV. As streaming services become more and more expensive, I’m starting to abandon some paid services and spend more time on free ones. JustWatch’s new service is surprisingly well-stocked from the start; I suspect they’ve been watching what people search for and making some smart bets on the content.Claude Duet. Here’s Anthropic’s answer to Muse, Instinct and Dots. Duet seems to focus on helping you get things done at work by creating to-do lists, coordinating meetings, and collecting data for you. He’s still only on the waitlist at the moment, but it will be interesting to see if he’s as hungry for attention as Muse. Wildwood. Before you watch this gorgeous, excellent stop-motion film, read everything you can about how it was made. There’s not a pixel of generative AI in sight, just an incredible amount of human hard work and creativity. Humans are great, artists are great, this movie is great. The Teenage Engineering EP-35. When you go to buy this, it’s technically called “Life is Fantastic!” Which, for sure. This thing is a battery-powered, multi-input, multi-instrument amp with lots of effects. As always, it looks extremely attractive. I don’t use it and I want it with all my might. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. Nintendo basically hasn’t changed the formula here since Wii Sports two decades ago, and I have no problem with that. Anything that gives me that super active tennis and bowling (plus volleyball, boxing, thumb wrestling, and more) is a win in my book. Delta 2.0. The next few weeks will be full of interesting app updates as developers try to figure out what to do with Apple’s foldable phone. But one of the best is now available; Delta can now cosplay quite successfully like any handheld console. (Plus Sega Genesis!) Kindle Plus. This is mostly just a rebranding of Kindle Unlimited, but Amazon included a couple of interesting new features in its $12 monthly reading subscription, including AI-narrated audiobooks. I have doubts about them, but I’m excited about expanding access to audiobooks. We’ll see. The worst news of the week here at Installerverse is that Arc is going away. This was obviously coming: The Browser Company abandoned Arc two years ago in favor of the more AI-focused Dia, and Arc has been in maintenance mode ever since. But now it is not only ignored, it is disappearing. By Christmas, you won’t even be able to use the app anymore. So now many of us are stuck looking for another browser. There are a million new ones, many of them somewhere between “heavily inspired by Arc” and “a direct copy of Arc I made in Codex this morning.” I need to try many of them. I don’t know exactly where I’ll land yet, but I thought I’d share some of the ones I’m looking at: Dia. It’s recently gotten a lot of Arc’s best features, and some of the AI stuff is pretty cool. (And luckily it’s easy to disable.) The Browser Company’s attention to aesthetic details remains the best in the business, so I’ll start here.Zen. A total rip-off of Arc, and I mean that as a compliment. Zen runs on Mozilla’s Gecko engine rather than Chromium, which is a plus for anyone looking for a little less Google influence in their lives. The last time I tried Zen it was a bit buggy and unpolished, but I hear it’s come a long way. Orion. I’m a dedicated and very happy Kagi user, and I’ve heard good things about how simple and friendly the company’s browser is. Given Kagi’s seamless integration, I expect this one to win for me. Vivaldi. I used Vivaldi for a while and I love how customizable it is. I finally set it up exactly how I wanted it. But along with all that customization there is a feeling of discomfort and I couldn’t get comfortable with the browser. I might try again. Helium. The opposite of Vivaldi, this is a super minimalist and simple browser. It’s probably what I need, honestly. Firefox. Its confusing stance on AI aside, I like many of the recent design and feature choices Firefox has made. I’m also intrigued by some of the forks of Firefox, like Waterfox and Floorp, which give you even more customization options. Brave. Brave has always felt too heavy for me and is always trying to convince me to use more of its own (and often underpowered) features. But it seems to always win in privacy comparisons, so you might have to try again. On mobile devices, it’s easy. Quiche is by far my favorite iOS browser. Arc was never good on Android, so I bet most of us never switched there in the first place. There are also the default browsers, of course, like Chrome, Safari, and Edge. But each of those browsers keep failing in one way or another, and my search continues. If you’ve found the browser of the future, tell me all about it! Otherwise, I will report here periodically throughout my journey. Here’s what the installer community likes this week. I want to know what you’re up to now too! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal, @davidpierce.11, with your recommendations for anything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here each week. For even more great recommendations, check out the responses to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky. “Youth is an absolute SCREAM on HBO Max right now.” — Jonathan “Todoist has a stellar integration with Siri AI that has finally made me fully commit to using it. If you remove Reminders, Todoist becomes the default in Siri AI and you can add a to-do to any project with tags AND location support (using saved Apple Maps locations like home and work!). The best part is that it all works WITHOUT having to say ‘…on todoist’ at the end of each query!” — Sajishnu “Apple added Sound Glow to HomePod models!” existing and it’s really fun to see the light on top of the HomePod glow and blink. So I’m doing that with some of my favorite playlists. — Connor“I’m reading a book called How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler because I want to get better at analyzing and reading for understanding rather than absorbing basic information.” — Rhoades“My girlfriend took a train trip up the West Coast and reported that no less than four different people asked her if her 2024 Samsung Galaxy Z-Flip 6 was the new iPhone Duo.” — Nicholas”I recently read Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske, and it was excellent. What if medical school was magical, but everyone was still sleeping with each other and stressed about student loans? Then an unexpected corpse shows up during finals.” — Emmett “Last month I got a Framework 13 Pro laptop running Ubuntu and I’m very happy with it. (I haven’t done anything with Linux in maybe 20 years; it’s come a long way!) So now I’m trying to see if I can replace Capture One with Darktable. If I can, that would break my last bond with macOS and I’ll replace my iMac with a Framework desktop.” — Morgan “Exploring the new Nektropos Castle dungeon in EverQuest Legends. The game has been a nostalgic trip back to 1999, but new content in an old game is a strange treat.” — Alex “Setting up Navidrome and asking Claude to create me a definitive ‘Songs From the Black Hole’ playlist from my Weezer MP3 collection. (It’s harder than it first seems: Is ‘Lisa’ track 12 or not!?)” – Micheal “Best Buy did a pretty amazing deal on a Bambu A1 Mini, so we got my 12-year-old son a 3D printer for his birthday. It’s amazing how easy it was to produce a seemingly perfectly accurate PLA print, compared to the horror stories of older printers.” — JeffLast week, my wife and I went car shopping. Our plan was to just drive a bunch of cars (we knew we needed something with three rows and we didn’t really have experience with any of them) and then head home. Somehow, a few hours later, we were the proud and slightly bewildered owners of a new Kia Carnival. So far the car has been great, but boy, there are a lot of strange technological ideas in cars now. I’m good with CarPlay and Android Auto. I hate that everything has become a touch screen. But what surprises me most is how many of my car’s features now exist in a companion app. How do we feel about this? I almost missed it when I had no idea what to do with the check engine light. Anyway, I’m a minivan parent now. I think I’m fine with that. Send car tips! Send minivan tips! Send help! See you next week! 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