It’s no surprise HN is skeptical about « yet another browser », so here’s what I like specifically about Arc:
- it supports tab tiling. I can see 2 tabs next to one another easily. This is NOT solved with window tiling, it’s clunky and clutters the space.
- it’s vertical tab support is good, and beautiful. Firefox also has vertical tabs via Sidebery and TreeStyleTab, but it’s pretty awful. It hacks on side panels to implement something looking like tabs, but the look and feel honestly sucks
- theming is very easy and beautiful. Also it works by « space »
- lots features dedicated to avoiding tab cluttering:
1. Tabs can auto close when inactive
2. Links that should open a new tab don’t open a new tab by default, they open a pop-in that I can expand to a dedicated tab if I want
3. Links outside of Arc (in a mail client, in a terminal…) don’t open a new tab, they open in a unique Arc window (Little Arc), and I can expand them in a dedicated tab if I want
4. Spaces and profiles allow to organize the tabs properly
- it also integrates with a few websites, for example it can display infos directly on some non-open tabs. On my GitHub tabs, it shows the number of PRs awaiting my review. If I hover on my Google Agenda tab, it display a small agenda for the day without opening a tab
I’m sure I forget a few things that I like. None of these features individually would make me switch to Arc, but seeing all of it at once made me try it, and I don’t regret it.
Also their release notes are fun to read.
The other great feature is the "Little Arc" window that appears when opening links in other apps. This lets you check something out, close the window, and resume what you were doing, preventing you from getting sucked into the Web and away from the conversation you were having.
I don't find much else compelling, but these are both really nice. For some reason, I don't care at all about the tiling system or the Boosts feature (modifying pages to remove elements, change fonts, etc) even though people talk about those a lot. If they can think of one or two more really useful features (and communicate them properly on the website) then they'll gain a lot of users.
At least, they'll gain a lot of users on the Mac. The biggest downside is the lack of Windows and Linux support. They're working on Windows. I don't see them doing Linux at all, but who knows.
That said it's probably fine for them to iterate for Mac customers first, like apps releasing on iOS first before supporting Android.
Firefox forever, yo! Whitest guy ever tries to make an F gang sign with his fingers
Last year I've used Sideberry extensively. It has some nifty features that TST does not have.
Do these two extensions look native to their host OS? Nope. I can live with that if don't need to use another closed source Chrome clone.
Curious, what display/screen size are you mostly using?
I find TST quite hard to use on a Macbook / Laptop screen... it's much better on a bigger screen though, and best when using a second/separate display/window for it.
To be clear maybe the term « awful » was a bit harsh, I don’t want to shit on TST/Sidebery, I know the limitations they face on Firefox. I said it multiple times, but I’m mad that seeing the relative success of TST/Sidebery in their add on catalog, Mozilla didn’t invest anything in experience around vertical tabs, and tabs in general. Arc is fundamentally a big rethinking of what tabs should/could be in a browser.
I think tab tilling in Arc is only good if you use ultrawide screen and/or stay in browser for your workflow, other wise it's yet another layer of window management (windows, tabs, tiles in windows) you have to remember.
When you use smaller screen it would be good if instead of resizing the tiles to try to fit the sreen, maybe keep them the same size but alow horizontal scroll to go through them?
I wrote a custom stylesheet for Tree Style Tab years ago. Did you do this, and if so, what did you find lacking afterwards?
Orion Browser by Kagi: Very fast. Zero telemetry.
Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions.
Orion supports Firefox and Chrome browser extensions natively. Whether you prefer getting them from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-Ons... as well as bringing support for as many as we can to iOS…
Q: Is Orion open-source?
A: We’re working on it!...[0]
Q: Is Orion truly safe if it’s not open-source?
A: The idea that "open-source = trustworthy" only goes so far...[1]
Don’t think it’s much different to use a closed source application than it is to use an open source app that somebody else compiled and put into your systems package repository.
Orion and Kagi (subscription search engine) are both great products, been using them for over a year, though I main FF.
> Agrawal decided early on not to try and rebuild the whole browser stack, and based Arc on Chromium like everyone else.
Ladybird this ain't. More like YACI (yet another chromium implementation).
The only question is if they can actually make money, and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that. Opera, the browser company had revenue of around $380 million last quarter, but if you don't use their browser, which is also "just" a chrome wrapper, you'd never know it.
To put it another way, Linux distros; Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc, are all "just" wrappers around the Linux Kernel. Yet "I made a Linux Kernel wrapper" is worth at least a billion, in the case of Red Hat. If you never come near that distro, you might not even see a reason for its value, but you can't argue with their sales numbers.
That being said I’d strongly prefer the native WebKit be used since it wouldn’t make the thing 300mb.
The value, in this case, is in the UI. The engine is a commodity.
I don't love Arc -- I bounced off it pretty fast -- but it's not insane to think that a VC would see the reuse of the most common browser engine as a good thing, as it means less work on the part of the developers and more of a focus on what sets the browser apart.
What's more absurd to me would be to use it because it's pretty and has vertical tabs as if it was the features pitched to raise money ...
A browser, un no circumstances, should be log-in walled.
Seemed like a great user experience as a browser, but unfortunately I uninstalled it as soon as I launched it to a sign in screen.
It does? Well, that's a showstopper right there. At least I know I can safely ignore this browser from here on out, though. Thank you!
Why? Not that Arc does this, but in today's modern world, we're two device creatures; a smartphone and a laptop. How do you connect the two if not with some sort of login?
> Why do we collect personal data? > Protect against fraud, or implement additional security measures.
Another play on the verified human angle ?
Requires sign in on launch... https://i.imgur.com/89Oegnf.jpeg
from real people, or probably-paid articles on tech blogs?
It worked for Apple so I can't blame them for trying, but it makes the entire thing feel so empty.
It looks like someone mashed the basic features Microsoft built into Edge into a a frame around Webkit with one or two cool features.
I don't want to go all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 but Microsoft Edge seems to be doing most of the features this browser seems to have and more, and it's from a software company I expect to still exist in five years.
Not criticize that :
- "won´t ever sell your data" is an empty promise
- "We never sell your data, and we’ll only share it in the following circumstances: With our Service Providers" O yeah they don't sell just share ... (with a list of what a Service provider may be but not what it may not be).
- "Why do we collect personal data? Protect against fraud" strange would have not listed that first.
And no amount of using it will change anything for those points.
Especially if they don't mention who do they milk money from. You'd have to be very naive to install this.
Only if you have better things to do. I've personally cleared my day to work on a "CharlesW DESTROYS Arc Browser SaaS Model for 43 Minutes" YouTube response.
The "why do i need an account" popup doesn't properly explain it to me either, syncing should be optional - let me use, or at least try, it without an account first.
Arc from the Browser Company - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795780 - Feb 2023 (3 comments)
What's Good About the Arc Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33932045 - Dec 2022 (6 comments)
Thoughts on Arc Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539549 - Nov 2022 (83 comments)
The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33414565 - Oct 2022 (90 comments)
Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544988 - May 2022 (125 comments)
Something really gets under my skin with the way they talk about Arc on their website. There is nothing on their website that means anything. Previously the headline of their website was literally "Arc is a browser". Are you kidding?
It then went on to say that it's everything I care about. Really? How is that? What do I care about? Are you sure you know what I care about? Then finally it asks me if I'm ready to let go of the old internet.
If you're going to say stuff like this, I think most of us at least on HN would expect them to be doing something where the benefits are very apparent. Or at the least, they'd have rebuilt the browser from the ground up. It's built on Chromium and therefore will have similar issues and limitations.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Chromium, I'm happy to use such a browser but I think it's time Arc decided to explain what their goal is using English, or something we can actually understand.
Changing the color of my browser isn’t really something I find worthwhile. Nor is moving the URL bar to the left; my monitor is more wide than tall, so it’s easier on my eyes and for moving my mouse to just look up as opposed to the left for navigation.
Competing against Chrome is interesting, although it’s still powered by Chromium, so nothing changes there. They are still at the mercy of features Google decides are worth pursuing, rather than W3C.
Otherwise… Good luck.
This is due to a number of things, like the degree of UI polish and a UX I personally find very intuitive, but I think the biggest factor comes down to their features around tab management. Namely the following:
1. Tabs closing automatically by default unless explicitly pinned 2. Being able to group pinned tabs into folders 3. Pinned tabs remembering their original state (e.g. if I pin a tab, then navigate to some other page, I can click the favicon to return to the original page I pinned) 4. The ability to rename tabs to make them more meaningful 5. Organizing tabs into an easily-collapsible sidebar 6. Having multiple spaces for different "contexts"
These features may not be particularly novel, and I'm sure they could be easily replicates w/ extensions or add-ons, but the fact that things work like this by default and are super easy to manage feels pretty fantastic.
As an example, I recently started rewriting my neovim config, and created a new space called "neovim config" so I could quarantine the tab clutter away from my normal browsing. Then I pinned the GitHub page for my old config so I could reference it easily. And lastly I created folders for "installed plugins", "required plugins" and "optional plugins" to help me organize the GitHub pages of all the plugins I've already installed, plan to install, or merely want to test out. Then if I run into any bugs or need to reference Lua syntax I can open a bunch of ephemeral tabs to stack overflow or whatever and easily clean them up once I'm done.
I know I'm probably sounding like an Arc shill at this point, but I do genuinely feel like Arc is helping me get this work done more efficiently whereas I feel like just about any other browser would be getting in my way. The simplest way I could describe it is it's almost like Trello and Safari had a baby that somehow inherited the best qualities of each, with none of the drawbacks.
Want vertical tabs? Vivaldi. Side bar? Vivaldi. Workspaces? Vivaldi. Mouse gestures? Vivaldi. Vertical space? Vivaldi. Customizable speed dial? Vivaldi. Keyboard commands? Popout mini-browser? Encrypted sync? Page tiling? Chrome extensions? Multiple types of tab groups? Excellent tools for inspection, screenshotting, etc.? Total anonymity? Everything comes up Vivaldi.
And what's more, Vivaldi actually works for the USER. They spoof their ID (due to Google sabotage) that lets us use Bing Chat without switching to Chrome. They don't even ask for your email address, unlike Arc. They'll GIVE you an email system for free. Vivaldi's openly committed to rejecting Google's Manifest v3 that cripples user control over what information is collected by Google and what extensions a user can use in their own browser.
And yet Vivaldi receives virtually no attention or praise. And Arc has been showered with it for years, despite never shipping a product until today. It's... very strange. This browser is everything I could ever dream of, and it doesn't get a fraction of the attention that Firefox, Brave, or Chrome gets.
Link for Vivaldi, from the same people behind the original Opera: https://vivaldi.com
In Vivaldi
1. Everything is very very tiny. You have to google there is zoom ui slider - but after changing to 130% I finally have nice padding but it scales all UI so now I endup with very big and fat icons and fonts. What's worse those icons, font looks like are just rasterized and because of that not sharp
2. Default selected tab and tab colors are very cluttered
3. Their command panel cmd+e is very cluttered and need to learn about new shortcut (I don't want to create notes, search history, bookmarks, I want to only search current open tabs, search engine, execute command or open by url. This panel also very tiny
4. Trash button doesn't work for me - doesn't do anything. I expected it will nuke all open tabs - last time I used vivaldi many years ago this was the final straw for me - closing like 50 tabs was taking like 5+ seconds.
1) I'm not sure I understand. You don't like how small the icons are, so you made them larger, but then you don't like they're larger? Like you, I also like nice big hitboxes, and I haven't noticed any issues. If you're just trying to scale the webpage zoom, look at the bottom right corner of the status bar -- there's a zoom bar you can drag.
2) Try the Human theme, which changes colors to complement whatever webpage you're looking at. I absolutely love it. I use vertical tabs, which aren't cluttered; maybe the horizontal tabs are? If you don't like square tabs, you can round the corners to squircles in the settings.
3) The command panel works flawlessly for me to search current open tabs, bookmarks, etc. Maybe it's just a different implementation than Firefox?
4) The trash icon at the bottom of the vertical tabs isn't to close all tabs -- if you want to do that, just right-click any tab and select "close all tabs below." The trash icon is a SUPER useful recovery tool that stores your browsing history, essentially. If you accidentally close a tab or a window, you can just restore it by clicking the trash icon and selecting the closed tab/window in reverse chronological order.
Vivaldi today is what Firefox was twenty years ago -- just outstripping all competition and being an absolute joy for the end user. You can customize Vivaldi to be whatever you want it to be, and I think you'd really enjoy it as your default browser.
However, not every feature is a hit for me. I use the tab management extensively and enjoy the quick action toolbar. I don't see much of their quick-action integrations with particular websites but when I have seen them they've been nice to haves. I don't use the "easels" at all and don't see any need for them or problem they solve for me. I don't find the personalisation all that useful. This does all lead me to wonder if Arc is designed for me, or just happens to currently align well enough with my needs for me to find it valuable. Will they move in a direction away from what I need in the future? Maybe. I hope this is just a feature-maximalism strategy and that it continues to be useful for many in the long term, but I fear that it may become to the web what Hey is to email, where what I want is a more traditional Mimestream/Mail.app.
It is not pushing forwards what the web can be, as I feel many people in these comments are wanting or hoping for, and to be honest I think that's fine. It doesn't need to. We have Mozilla, Google, and Apple, each pushing forwards what the web is in their own ways, in healthy tension with each other.
It seems they wanted to get an MVP out and chose MacOS first. It might be annoying for Windows/Linux users but there's nothing wrong with the approach.
More on topic, seems it's still a waitlist? I go to their page and see "Join Waitlist" and "Coming in Winter 2023", so maybe page hasn't been properly updated yet?
Monetisation for browsers is incredibly hard, and doing it in a way that respects the end user is even harder. Curious to see their play.
They won’t be making anywhere near 1/10th of what Firefox makes, even with 1/10th of the user base, because those are highly specialised contracts.
Google typically won’t touch you at all (although the founders connections may help them here, but I could see that upsetting some of Google’s business partners). Almost every Google search partnership is a legacy one.
With Bing, you’re looking at a standard revenue share, of which they take a cut, and you’re at the whim of seasonality, not a fixed sum as say Firefox has. Then, the investors won’t just want their investment back; they’ll want a proper return as well.
Like I’ve said, the monetization opportunities that respect the user are hard.
Avast made a killing with their browser, and they did that by selling user data.
The fact that they’re a closed source browser does not lend them any favours.
It feels worse than chrome while being obnoxious about supposedly being "groundbreaking"...
arc can go shaft itself
Hopefully the competition bodes well for end users with open minds.
Immediately following this is a form for me to enter my email address so I can receive a download link. Sorry Arc, that’s not a trade I’m willing to make.
EDIT: ah ok, they ask for an account after you have downloaded 300MB of junk.
They presumably do this so that people can download it later from desktop using the emailed link. It's easy to mistake it as an attempt to harvest email IDs. The website could definitely use some text which indicates that it's Mac only at the moment.
In other words, when is the rug pull coming and what is it going to look like?
It removes a lot of tab anxiety, and helps me organise actual useful links from things that are interesting for just now.
They have a few videos on their YouTube channel but they're not well made imho. They lack a proper script and are far too long because of the lack of proper structure.
I am surprised they released v1 without a few polished videos explaining their USPs.
Great:
- Picture in Picture mode automatically when switching tabs from YT, Soundcloud, etc
- Swiping the trackpad with two fingers to switch profiles instantly
- Clean interface
- Clicking links opens a small window for you to quickly check the content, and if you want to continue you can maximise it, or you click the page in the background to return to the page you were on. Speeds up quick reads for me
- Much thought into where to put UI elements
- Some great shortcuts, like copying current URL (Command + Shift + C), clearing tabs (Command + Shift + K)
- The sidebar design doesn't always play nice with websites
- The way you pin extensions is a bit annoying
- I bump into bugs sometimes since it's early days
- I have no interest in using their Notes, Easels or Download system (easily ignored tho)
- Settings have a very "startup-hype" membership card that serves no purpose, while also not having many settings for customisation. Weird choice imo
- No interest in the auto-archive feature, but impossible to turn off
Agree with that one. They’re struggling a bit to find a good place to put extensions. The latest iteration is fine, but still not great.
Zero telemetry is good.
A suspend feature, like the low power mode, is good idea.
To edit text on page, I think that the web developer menu is many browsers would be suitable for such a purpose, and a separate menu for that seems unnecessary to me.
Allow copy/paste is good, although I would do it a bit differently. Similarly like many spreadsheet programs have the option for manual or auto calculation, to do that for web pages also; if set to manual calculation mode then nothing is calculated or sent to the server until you push send or recalculate, and most events are suppressed, so it cannot prevent you to copy/paste, nor can it spy on data that you have entered but chosen to not send yet. It would also improve speed and less power, and avoid problems with some forms that will put in a number automatically if you erase the number and make it difficult to enter the correct number due to that. So, it would solve ten problems at once.
"Open Page in Internet Archive" may be useful, but seems to me should be an extension rather than a built-in feature (although it could be an extension which is included by default).
However, some things that would be good to have in a web browser would be: User controlled request/response headers (this can make many other settings unnecessary, e.g. language, as well as anything that can be controlled by the Content-Security-Policy header, etc). Add user styles and user scripts (without needing to package an extension). Be able to use native code extensions (which must be installed manually and cannot be installed from the web service). Relative location bar mode. ARIA mode.
Profiles on the macOS version made me switch to it from Safari as my daily driver.
I really want to use Kagi, but I think that their design principals are antithetical with mine and may others.
But, I think it's great for a lot of people, particularly those that seek alternative browsers.
Over time maybe there will be less of a use case as other browsers copy the UI and features.
Otherwise without it Arc experience is bad: 1. importing ~5k of bookmarks (yes I use bookmarks as some link I might potentially find useful 1 year later and just tagging them like: "ml, model, ai stable, diffusion" so I can easily search for it even few years later) take very very long time 2. they all endup in folder as tabs and such big amount of bookmarks keeps left bar very slow 3. arc seem not to import tags from firefox 4. there is no bookmark manager were you can easily search by title, keywords, tags or sort by date
It has been a while when I got the Arc Browser but I could not get myself to get used to the excessive feature. I personally am unable to figure out what to think about it. A younger me would have loved this browser but now, I'm (very personal) more of sticking to the basics/native and spend extra time learning the tips/tricks and the internals to be able to use a tool/system more effectively.
1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company
It's also kinda patronizing to say "here's how the browser should work" as if people are morons in 2023 and have no clue how to use a browser, let alone their supposed target audience. I'm not even touching the "sign up to continue" issue others mentioned...
The news should actually be they got $18M in funding for this (FFS).
I've noticed recently that Safari uses 1/3 to 2/3 of a gigabyte for each youtube tab, or gmail, or <many other sites>.
Arc uses roughly 25% of that.
Also, Arc's efficiency as tabs build up seems to grow faster than Safari's although that's harder to quantify. But in concrete terms, Safari puts my M1 Air's memory into the yellow in activity monitor almost immediately. Arc regularly stays green with 20-30 tabs open.
There are other nice things to consider, but that's huge for me.
And I'm not alone either, looking at Reddit & Discord in the past.
Made me also switch away again recently. Would love to see them focus more on that instead of all those gimmicks. (Actually expected that before seeing them ship 1.0.)
Also, the way they handle extensions and especially the recent changes getting rid of the extension bar top right are/were also not great.
It’s not like I was very methodical about it, but the results were as plain as day. I mean, yellow vs. green isn’t hard to see. I’ll try the exact same sites/tabs from a fresh boot for safari, chrome and arc and report back.
I haven’t been in reddit since June — Apollo user, and old.reddit.com just sucks so hard.
What about extensions? I only installed a couple, but I had no problem. That
https://github.com/nerdyslacker/desktop-web-browsers
List of Headless Web Browsers:
https://github.com/dhamaniasad/HeadlessBrowsers
List of Open Source Web Browsers/Browser Engines:
Some of the decisions I don't like (my Bitwarden button is hidden by default which makes password filling hard - I don't have it fill automatically on page load), but overall I've enjoyed using it. My favourite features:
- split tabs (I prefer this over tiling in the WM)
- little arc
- PiP works very well for video calls
- I have a bunch of apps pinned (ChatGPT / Gmail / Calendar / Github) and a bunch of tabs below that
- I like the single action bar on Cmd-T
Overall, big fan, and I'd pay some amount for it probably.
Their whole approach is great for minimalists (especially for someone like me with ADHD) but will probably be hated by the many tab hoarders on HN.
If nothing else, I hope Arc inspires other browser makers to think outside the box with stuff like this.
Not sure how interested I am in a browser where I need to sign in to use. An insane decision, imo.
Just like the hotel in Las Vegas called "The Hotel". Is it arrogance, or ignorance?
I don't see anywhere mentioned this browser having access to Chrome extensions so for me, even if I'd be slightly interested in testing this (and it would be still possible on my Intel Macbook) it's a hard miss. Not being able to block ads and tracking elements in 20s is out of the question and no fancy annotation or vertical tabs feature with grouping compensates this. Guess this thing aims at those who don't mind their privacy being violated - perhaps all sorts of influencers.
The only thing they got are Boosts which seem to be kind of user scripts feature
They know exactly what is needed for good browsing experience, don't they? :/
I can't leave Chrome until I can replace Google's single sign on
i think they’re doing some interesting stuff, but i just couldn’t find features or workflows that were safari-killers for me.
The problem is that the Swift for Windows platform is not really a thing.
I don't think I want to have anything to do with this company. Super cringe.
I get the impression that Arc will be a form over function product reflecting someone's understanding of good design and insisting on it. Not that I'd use a closed source browser anyway.
It's also known as moving at crawl speed, unless you have serfs doing the real work for you.
Terrible design decision.
No. Never. Put the download link on your website.
There are some features like the ability to "peek" into a webpage or Little Arc which is really handy for SSO popups without changing full focus to the browser that makes other browsers feel like a step down.
That said, and maybe this will change post-1.0, there were a lot of basic bugs that popped up over time like tabs disappearing from the sidebar, tabs "syncing" into the void because the browser blindly copied state from another browser, tabs that can't be closed and so on.
Generally these are fixed and don't happen all at once but when they do, it rubs up against the new features being touted to make you feel insane. "Boosts are great but I just want the browser to stop interfering so I can do some work"
Anyway, it's a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes. I love it and anything else is a downgrade but it also keeps hurting me but nowhere near enough to outweigh the benefits.
As far as support goes, it feels bit like they're a victim of success. Almost every ticket used to get a response but now I rarely hear anything which makes the canned "We value your feedback" feel hollow. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Support has changed. It's just a somewhat unavoidable outcome when you start as part of a niche and the userbase rapidly grows, making replying to everything untenable.
In all, I'm glad there is a new entrant. Would a new engine be nice? Sure but differentiating a browser and building a full rendering engine at the same time is a bit of a tall order off the bat.
Perhaps if they had a cash generating machine already like Google did. It'll be interesting to see if that changes in future (I assume it won't be who knows) and they're doing a lot of interesting work porting Swift to Windows (their strategy for porting Arc)
I'm still a daily user since things have been solid for the last little while but I do wonder how things might degrade (enshittify) given a future need to return VC investment. You can learn a bit about their monetisation thinking here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eVda3zFLlhc
Lastly, I'll plug their YouTube channel which is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBrowserCompany
Particularly the videofile series which talks a lot about their internal workings, metrics and so on. There are times that I've had bad bugs or a new feature was ill received and then the next videofile confirms they've seen that reaction in bulk too