How is this unknown company a challenger? How is this even worthy of Bloomberg to report on
Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
111–120 of 144 posts
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#112"Arc Browser" is just Chromium + uBlock + some GUI enhancements I really wish that articles about "new browsers" should state up front what (if anything) they are built on top of. Each time I am hopeful that someone has taken on the monumental task of creating a new, better, or at least different web engine/ browser. The competition would be good. The near impossible complexity in writing a new web browser from scrat…
Maybe serenityOS browser will be the new engine/browser that rivals existing browser engines
See https://mobile.twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1508953394836...
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#113“It will be free upfront; the team is looking at developing premium subscription features for enterprise users, perhaps somewhere around $12 a month, echoing the freemium model of Slack Technologies Inc., Dropbox Inc., and other productivity services.” Good luck with that. The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it. If it’s open source then it will be ridiculed for not having an op…
> The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it Keep in mind that the last time this was tried, free/open-source alternatives were on-par if not better and the web was much less hostile. Nowadays, not only is the web teeming with hostility that can best be addressed by a browser, but the closest free/open-source solution (Firefox) is half-baked and doesn't actually solve many of these…
"Half-baked" means Firefox adopts slogans like "protecting the open web" and it purports to represent the interests of web users, however its true goals are to generally to match Chrome feature-for-feature and preserve the status quo on the web which is that it provides an optimal medium for advertising. It gets over 90% of its financial support from Google, not web users.
From the comments some people's idea of a fully baked Firefox is a browser that generally works exactly like Chrome and Safari on the surface but is somehow better, e.g., because it does not overtly sell advertising services. An enormously complex program with a gazillion knobs and dials that no average web user would ever touch. Sending all search queries of these users to Google by default. Perfect.
Another idea of a fully-baked "Firefox" is one that has options to allow mere mortals to compile it from source on modest hardware in a reasonable amount of time. There could be multiple versions of Firefox, that could all be built from the same source tree, each a different compile time option, or a set of compile-time options. Some of these might exclude support for features that make the web optimal for advertising or commerce, i.e., essential features of Chrome or other "modern" web browsers. Scaled-down versions might be optimised for different experiences. Not all them driven by Javascript. For example, fast consumption of noncommercial content with minimal surveillance, and no advertising. Essentially "Reader Mode" as the default.
What is the point of having Firefox be open source if almost no one can download the source and start creating new and different web clients with it. Instead it is a project that only tries to keep pace with Chrome, getting larger and larger, more and more complex. It appears to have no other purpose. Tunnel vision. Follow the leader.
Make no mistake, I am not suggesting there should be no Firefox version that does almost everything that Chrome does, as there is now. Mozilla has supported use of the web for advertising and commerce. They have supported Yahoo, Inc. and Google, LLC. That's wonderful. Great job.
What I am suggesting is that Firefox should also have smaller, simpler versions that deliberately do not do all the things that Chrome does. Mozilla should also work to support noncommercial web use. Compile-time options to remove Javascript, telemetry and a host of other things some users may prefer to do without. Give people choice.
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Enterprise™ spends a lot of money on (often dubious) security products > a browser with built-in security features (both against malware and other features such as DLP, blocking/filtering/monitoring without middleboxes) It'll be hard to outdo Google at security research and hardening
Last month Google announced 30 new security including critical vulnerabilities in chrome. They might be doing a great job at hardening, but they don’t have a great reputation.
> Last month Google announced 30 new security including critical vulnerabilities in chrome.
This doesn't mean chrome is less secure than other options, it means people are heavily incentivized to find and report security problems and google is open about issues that are found.
This makes me feel better about chrome's security, not worse, and I say this as someone who is overall kind of iffy on google these days.
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
a ui on top of chrome doesn't get you $25 million in funding and a dedicated Bloomberg article edit: apparently it does
I'd expect the opposite. It's likely not worth funding someone to reimplement a whole browser engine instead of reusing an existing one. It would take a lot of time and money to build and maintain and you don't gain too much by having your own entirely custom engine.
There's a difference between forking a full browser (this is quite easy initially, but down the road your fork may end up being difficult to maintain) and building a new browser on top of the rendering engine (Blink here, could be Gecko or Webkit). In the latter case, the initial investment is higher, so getting to a daily driver product requires more effort. However long term that can be beneficial because you don't conflict that much with upstream changes.
Writing a new rendering engine and browser on top is totally different effort as you may guess.
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
beyond a slightly different UI, there's nothing you can "reimagine" in a web browser embedding third-party services is a feature that is prone to break often Chrome became the #1 because it was technically advanced (faster) but more importantly - endorsed by a search giant
The UI shown in the screenshot is radically different.
i see bookmarks, tabs, navigation and the browser window
nothing in the interface looks “radically different” to me
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#117In my opinion, they don't seem to solve the browser tab problem, just iterate on it. Just remove them completely and let you window manager manage your windows. (And yes, Firefox still supports browsing without tabs, so we got what we need right there ;)
Firefox still supports browsing without tabs
It sort of does. I can't open settings in a new window without opening settings in a new tab first and then moving the tab to a new window. Or, create a new window and paste about:preferences into the url bar. Maybe there's some userChrome.css to do it.
I can create userChrome.css, which is discouraged, in order to hide the redundant tab bar with the single tab in it. Yes, it sort of works, it's kludgy and has issues.
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#118Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#119Tab-groups has fixed this clutter for me. I can:
+ hoard tabs in these groups (on safari),
+ close my browser session,
+ go and do something else with my life for a while,
+ come back (even on a different device) and open safari, select that saved tab group
+ the old ‘session’ is loaded and all my old tabs are back.
There’s no longer any need to keep a 100-tab browser session open any more. Sometimes the syncing is horrible with this feature across devices though. I find myself opening a new tab and the sync process immediately deleting it… more often than I’d like.
Re: Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger
#120I thought this was going to be about the Flow browser. I'm interested in Ekioh Flow as a faster browser engine. Unfortunately it seems to be shaping up to be not only closed-source, but only available to proprietary licensees rather than as a downloadable product to run on desktops.