Skip Navigation
104 comments

  • If this browser is as slow as their website, I can't say it's looking too good. It also appears to be just another Chromium browser, because I guess we needed more of those. And it appears to be closed source. Hard pass. ~Strawberry

    Edit: No plans for a Linux port and they're planning on shoehorning A"I" into it. I hate it already.

    • It uses whatever rending engine works best on the platform you're using - Chromium's main advantage is the extensive plugin library so that's the one they use on most platforms, though they have said they have internal builds that run on other rending engines and those work fine (except for plugins). If there's every any reason to drop Chromium they will.

      As for being "just another" anything - it really isn't. The way tabs work is fundamentally different to any other browser. At a glance, it just looks like a basic browser with tabs in the sidebar instead of across the top but it's so much more than that.

      For example most browser have three types of tab - Regular, Pinned, and Incognito. Arc has "Today" tabs, Pinned Tabs, Favourite Tabs (these are closer to "Pinned" tabs in other browsers), "Little" tabs, Split tabs, Popup Tabs, and Incognito tabs.

      Notice there is no "regular" on that list - none of the tabs in Arc behave like a regular browser tab. Arc also doesn't have bookmarks - tabs replace bookmarks. Here's the breakdown:

      • Today tabs go away at the end of the day (you can change this to be longer, I don't recommend doing that). They go into an Archive and can easily be recovered.
      • Pinned tabs aren't like pinned tabs are synced between all your devices/browser windows and they stick around until you get rid of them. The process to create and remove a pinned tab is really simple and they are organised in groups and folders. Pinned tabs won't necessarily bne running in RAM, so in a way they're almost like a bookmark.
      • Favorite tabs appear as just an icon instead of a full tab, and they appear in all of your groups (within a profile). They are also pre-loaded — handy for web apps that take a while to load.
      • A Little tab tab doesn't have tabs - it harkens back to the old days when the web was a lot simpler. It's useful for quickly looking something up and then closing it a few seconds later. Links from other apps open in this mode by default.
      • Split tabs are a single tab that contains multiple webpages - e.g. you might have your zoom meeting and your notes as a single tab.
      • Popup tabs are similar to "little" tabs, except instead of being in a separate window they are embedded in a tab. If you have, for example, your issue tracker as a pinned tab, and you load up a link to a different domain name, it will open in one of these. You can go back to your issue tracker by closing the popup tab instead of hitting the back button six times... but it will still be a single tab for both your issue tracker and the link that the issue tracker took you to.
      • Incognito works the same as any other browser.

      Yes - it is closed source... but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that's good enough.

      • Nice explanation. I haven't used it enough to judge yet myself. So far I find myself frustrated with the merging of tabs and bookmarks. Perhaps I'll get used to it but it makes no sense to me yet. I see no viable substitute for traditional browser bookmarks (at least not the way I use them). 95% of my bookmarks are pages I do not visit every week or even every month. Where are they supposed to go where they're both accessible and out of the way? Folders don't seem like a solution to me.

        Edit: another day in and I get it now. I realize now that opening folders in the pinned tabs section is madness, but there is a viable alternative: hover over the folder, then scroll/search for the bookmark you want and click it. That "tab" will now appear under the folder under pins, but the folder otherwise remains closed. So my tabs list does not get cluttered with inactive bookmarked pages, only the ones I have specifically opened, and only until I close them.

        This isn't a huge departure from "traditional" bookmarks systems.

        So far I find that Lemmy specifically is much better in Arc, because link to external sites open in popup tabs. All this time I've been spawning whole new tabs using keyboard/mouse combos like an animal. The future is now!

      • they have said they have internal builds that run on other rendering engines

        so, are there chances that in future there can be builds based on gecko?

      • When you put it that way, it does actually sound interesting, though I'm still a bit skeptical of its lack of open sourcing. In addition, unmodified Chromium phones home to Google a lot IIRC. There's a reason Ungoogled Chromium exists. If there's a way to use Ungoogled Chromium with it or even Gecko, it'd be a bit more compelling for me. I'm not quite sure if I see Chromium's extension library as a positive. I get that it's larger than Firefox's library, and I'm sure there are plenty of interesting ones that aren't on Firefox but are on Chromium. However, a lot of those extensions are either pretty low quality or are straight-up malware (I'm more concerned with the latter, the former can just be disregarded). It seems like every couple of months or so, a new article comes out about a bunch of malware being found on the Chrome Web Store. Even accounting for Firefox's smaller userbase, there are very few articles about such incidents happening on Mozilla's extension repository. And I've noticed that Mozilla tends to respond more quickly to reports of malware than Google does. CWS has also had a problem with survey scam extensions that blatantly impersonated various companies in the past, though I'm not sure if that's still a problem. I've recently found that FVD Speed Dial intercepts search queries that are supposed to go to Bing or Yahoo when you use the search bar added by their new tab page before redirecting you to Bing or Yahoo when it's not supposed to do that. Essentially an MITM attack. This behavior has gotten them banned from Mozilla's extension repository in the past, but despite the fact that they're still doing it, Google has featured the extension on CWS. ~Strawberry

  • It's still built on Blink so it is not a true Chrome alternative.

  • Is it just me, or is all they’ve done to move everything to the left sidebar and use macOS’s UI widgets?

  • Oh my god this comment section is annoying…

    Yes, we get it! It’s a Chromium fork!

    Chrome bad, Firefox good, we know.

    And there are plenty of reasons as to why it’s a bad thing but come on, probably more than half of the comments is just this. There’s a lot more to it.

    I don’t use Arc, because the whole company gives me “bullshit vibes”. The whole startup thing with big ideas and bright colors… and no concrete monetisation plan… I don’t know. I’ve seen too much of that and I can’t trust it. That and the whole “wanting to integrate AI@ just raises the “startup bullshit” meter even more for me.

    However. I’m keeping an eye on it, and I did got to try it during its invite phase and, it sure is something else. This is not just another Chromium fork. It does indeed have big ideas about UI and UX design and challenges the way we do things when browsing the web. It’s trying to be something new and innovative. I respect that.

    Web browsers have been feeling the same for years and years. To the average user, there’s no fundamental difference between Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, or Safari, other than: “They look slightly different ” and “This one looks like a crypto bullshit scam”. They will instantly notice the difference with Arc. It looks actually different and it feels different, because it is.

  • The organization features that I've seen look really nice. I've also wanted something as easy as Safari tab groups.. None of these ideas seem to trickle down to other browsers though, it's a shame

  • It's nice that they are trying to add new features and make it original in some way. But I will have to wait for Linux support, sadly.

104 comments