Today, Arc has moved toward AI tabs, shared Easels, and collaborative browsing. But every time you open a Space in Arc and see those circular avatars grouped together — that’s a ghost of Google+.

The Circles are gone. The +1 button is dust. But for a few months, inside a browser that wanted to reinvent everything, Google+ briefly lived again.

One internal tester described it as: “Walking through a mall that closed five years ago, but the lights are still on and the fountains still run.” Arc’s modern, minimalist, keyboard-driven ethos clashed beautifully with Google+’s maximalist 2010s design language: badged profiles, +1 buttons, animated GIF profile headers, and the infamous “What’s hot” fire icon.