You know most of consumer apps everybody uses are closed-source, right?
What they'll likely do is start charging for their AI-powered subscription and make a business plan for teams while building some features for their collaboration.
Great argument, how people may or may not use a browser in the future :) What if instead we look at current reality, which is what I outlined in my previous comment?
> The current reality is that Google has taken over the Web for all practical purposes
In the anglosphere and averaged out globally, yes, this is true. But country-per-country, the stats vary wildly. Some countries have ~20% Safari usage, others have ~20% Firefox usage. Other countries like Germany for example has Chrome usage below 50%, which is pretty neat.
But yeah, if you're a Usaian, I could understand if "the world" looks differently.
In Europe, and since five years that Firefox is no longer part of the browser acceptance matrix for project delivery acceptance testing, that I have been part of.
Ok fair enough. I've never heard them boast about this as an advantage in their other material (release notes, YouTube videos). I don't think this is really an advantage until they do actually have a different engine that you can swap out. Right now it feels very tied to Chromium.
They have however done some cool things with running Swift on Windows and rendering the UI via Windows APIs.
- named persistent spaces for groups of tabs, some can be pinned, some can be ephemeral
- spaces can have different profiles, so switching to personal stuff in a work context is no different than switching to any other space
- side-by-side tabs within spaces give an iPad-like split screen experience in the browser. I know the OS is meant to do this, but honestly window management in macOS is totally fucked and achieving the same thing is really hard.
Overall it's made navigating the web more effortless, and I hope other browsers copy. Safari tried with Tab Groups, but it's a pale imitation and when I go back it's vertical tabs that I miss most.
I gave it a serious go, and I use Kagi search (Orion is made by Kagi).
I'll be honest - I didn't like it. It felt more like Safari than Arc, but fell short of both. I had a particular problem with 1Password, but also the UI just felt clunky.
I haven't tried it for several months though, it might be better now.
There's also the paid SigmaOS browser, which is is the same vein, and I didn't like that either - it makes different decisions than Arc, IIRC the vertical tab is persistent, kinda like slide over multitasking on iPadOS.
I have an ultrawide display and sometimes I'd like to just add a bunch of vertical tabs (e.g. if I'm browsing house listings and want them side-by-side). It'd be cool if I could get a vertically scrolling view of individual tabs, but the UX on that would be difficult to get right.
Oh, another thing Arc is good at is trackpad support - I can just two-finger scrolling between spaces and it's a really nice experience. I will probably move away from Arc eventually, since it's VC funded and pretty much doomed, but I guess if they have a paid model like Kagi I might be tempted.
I also hate fragmentation between devices. Pretty much all my devices are Apple - MBP, multiple iPads, iPhone, etc. The value proposition of native tab syncing is very high, and whilst Arc has a companion app I don't like that experience.
> whilst Arc has a companion app I don't like that experience.
They also just announced that they submitted a mobile version of their browser (at least that's how I read it) to the iOS App Store. It's not to be published until early next year, but I'm also very much looking forward to a better mobile app, not just the companion, although the share extension is downright fantastic.
I tried signing up for it earlier this year, but they sent an email with a tracking link to download software I'm supposed to just install blindly. Doing things that way in 2023 struck me as so horrifically out of touch that I just passed on bothering with it.
Clearly a distinctly minority attitude, but I guess that's life.
Anything chromium based is just moving the problem of Chromium being overly dependent on Google sponsoring its development, setting its roadmap, and effectively taking important decisions as to what it can and cannot do. Long term, it would be nice to see Chromium becoming more independent from Google. It might take a fork and a consortium of companies taking over development instead of outsourcing that to Google.
But the reality today is that most development on Chromium is done pretty much exclusively by Google with trivial amounts of external contributions.
That's why I use Firefox. I'm not necessarily happy with how that is overly dependent on Google but at least they are semi independent.
The main issue is that there are plenty of companies that like the idea of providing a browser that don't seem to be interested in funding the development of one. Other than Google which at this point is bank rolling Chromium, Firefox, and Safari. This is weird and not long term sustainable.
I love Arc on my mac. I know it's not for everyone, but it does so many things right (for me) that going back to another browser is a major impediment to my workflows.
For me it's the first browser that has made proper tab management stick. I have way too many tabs, in the middle of the day I often have 40+ per window. The combination of pinned tabs, tab renaming, folders, auto-expiry, sync, and spaces, just works well. They have in my opinion perfectly developed the spectrum from ephemeral pages you need once to pinned pages you always have open, with many levels of granularity along that spectrum.
The rest of the browser, not for me. They have a whiteboarding feature, not sure why a browser needs that. They have AI now because of course they do.
I enjoy using it at home. The day they decide to charge $20 a month because of the AI features is the day I switch back to Chrome.
I don't understand those who have 40+ Tabs open. Whats so important about them, are they StackOverflow, Github pages?
I'm not trying to diss. I get it if you use WebUi of messenger services and maybe stats but can't think what-else it would be. I'd rather open a new browser window for those important services.
Myself gets overwhelmed when I have more than five. I use the bookmark bar more than tabs but an excessive amount of tabs?
I would see it as a form of data hoarding...
I close all tabs when I finish work daily. As the same that I move all emails in to a week ending folder ensuring that I have a clean mailbox for the following Monday.
Right now I've got email, todolist, 3 docs, 2x HN tabs, 6 bugs that I've been working on today, 5 experiment reports that I've been investigating, ~10 iterations of build results as I've been working through fixing a bug.
Do I need all of these? No. But figuring out which I don't need is more work so some will just accumulate for a while and once every few days I close everything.
Arc does a good job of expiring old tabs and also of letting me bump the priority of a tab in various ways.
It is for the same reason people prefer to sleep or hibernate there PCs instead of shutting them down. You don't want any breaks in your flow. Closing tabs and opening them again from bookmarks is annoying.
I keep tabs like production and development Firebase console, Github, Gmail, Trello, Slack, Google Cloud logs, documents/spreadsheets, Google searches, documentation/articles for features/bugs etc.
It makes my work faster since I everything I need is always available in the tab bar. Feature/bug related tabs are closed only when they are fully done and deployed to Production.
It helps to not just think of them as open tabs - personally I'd be overwhelmed with 40+ tabs as well, and that's exactly why a traditional browser frustrates me.
Think of them more as a combination tab/bookmark. Then tabs that are opened that aren't "bookmarked/pinned" are in a separate area; you can even set those to automatically close at the end of the day if you want
Do you use split tabs at all? I've found hiding the side pane and having multiple split tabs open in one window is a lot great when I'm trying to focus on work. Also not something totally new, but I use their Boosts feature a lot more than I expected, it's great to quickly "zap" elements from websites that I frequent.
Getting used to Arc's keyboard shortcuts and command palette has made it pretty indispensable in my work flow.
Only tried split tabs briefly, the UX didn't feel great to me. I might not be the target market here though as I tend to have a lot of tabs and navigate between them with keyboard shortcuts very quickly. I also prefer to just use the OS windowing for things that split tabs would be useful for.
My browser at work (Chrome) manages it performance wise with no issues. It's only a UI issue. I've tried plugins for vertical tab management and never found one I've liked for any of Chrome/Safari/Firefox. I've also tried built-in tab grouping in several browsers and also never managed to make one stick. They're often too inflexible I think.
Reducing the number of tabs is a good solution, but browsers don't tend to have features for this. Arc does, and I rely on its tab archiving which I think is pretty good.
This is great, although I wish the new mobile app they’ve alluded to was a higher priority (but I realize that’s being greedy).
Arc isn’t for everybody but if it “clicks” which requires getting over a somewhat steep learning curve it is great.
It’s also fair to question why it requires an account, but anything syncing across devices would (unless you handle that manually with version control or something else).
Arc is exactly what Chrome might be if it wasn’t beholden to an advertising-first company. The innovation within the Chrome app itself has languished & browser extension development and policy are prohibiting more & more significant user experience changes (not just blockers). Arc not only diverges from Chrome with a ton of nice user experience changes, it also adds new types of functionality like ad hoc browser extensions called Boosts that can be shared (very similar to UserScripts). So many posts that say this browser-based on Chromium is problematic because it constrains diversity in the browser market, but I wish more people would just try it out. It is a step in the direction. Maybe someday they will swap out all of what remains from Chromium, but to what end? Maybe the best thing about Chrome (and Chromium) is that it enables smaller companies to jump-start new concepts in browsing.
> List of Disabled Chromium Features
> Google account sync, metrics reporting, telemetry/crash reporting.
...
> Logging & analytics
> Sentry for telemetry/crash reporting.
> Segment for telemetry
> FAQ
> Why does Arc require an account to use
I find Arc's marketing around the lack of Google features a little disingenuous. They claim to not log any PII data, which is admirable, but they don't mention IP addresses as PII data and most likely do have that incidentally, or might need it for abuse prevention, and they haven't had third party security audits.
I’ve been using Arc for a couple days now and love it. It’s been a while since I’ve adopted a tool (besides developer tools) that I felt truly increased my productivity and enjoyment in my day-to-day activities.
A fair question. For Me I use use of their spaces feature to divide my tabs/bookmarks into different areas of concern. So when I'm working on my day job, I can have a running "session" of bookmarks, such as the webapp I'm building, figma, and chatGPT open. It just _feels_ less cluttered and less distracting. Their 'developer mode' adds a nice little tool bar accross localhost and other sites for which you enable it. It's just the compound effect of many small improvements. This the first real innovation I've seen the chrome of a browser in a long time.
https://thebrowser.company/ >
- We love the internet, but it can be overwhelming
- What if a browser could help us make sense of it all
My response to this.
Everyone uses the internet and thus by making such statements, this company can engage a lot of people.
I think this is an example of a problem that is far less "problematic" than what this company is trying to claim
At least, I was hoping for something more "revolutionary".
I have seen tabs on the left side, colours representing the workspace you find yourself in, themes and similar ways of organizing all the different websites you visit.
In the end of the day, here is my take (I would love to be proven wrong, though).
This is another attempt at trying to organize all the tabs you have open.
It is and not a solution to the problem they describe.
It's a typical overblown marketing statement, agreed. But I have to say, I've been exclusively using Arc since it released and I'm a huge fan.
Vertical tabs for sure aren't revolutionary - but the way they treat tabs that are kind of a mix of a bookmark & pinned tab really clicks with the way my brain wants to use a browser. It really has fundamentally changed how I work on the Internet for the better
The way it's written up made it seem like it was a cloud based browser with a separate client app on the user's OS.
The first time I read about this, I didn't get the point. It seems to mostly be about aesthetics and maybe some noise suppression. I still don't see why I should run this over Firefox.
IDK, maybe I might have ADHD or something, because I open every interesting link in a tab thinking I'll get back to it soon to finish reading or trying it out, but then never do because in the meantime I discover another more interesting tab, so they keep piling up.
I suffer from the same problem and my new solution has been to install a Firefox extension that, when I have more than 5 tabs open, closes any tabs that’s been idle longer than 5 minutes.
I found that with this approach I still get the dopamine hit without getting stuck sifting through 30 articles.
For the same reason you need a stack or a queue for depth/breadth first search. Open tabs represent yet to be completed work. It took work in the first place to open those tabs. If you close them you lose that work.
* Requires an account to use
An absolute shame in this day and age. But I have a feeling it's a requirement considering they raised $20M before even having a product ready.
Which leads to another point - what are they going to do to make sure they make a return for their investors?