Should be titled "Why one web pioneer thinks it's time to bundle more apps with your browser and change the way it does tabs". I like Arc, but they aren't reinventing the browser.
The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
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Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#12New rendering engine? Or yet-another-Chrom(e/ium)-clone with a different UI? Honestly, even the latter might be better if it's closer to what older browsers had, with a lot of options to configure and not the dumbed-down useless-UI trend that seems to be gradually infecting everything. That's one of the reasons I use Firefox, although it seems to be slowly going down the same path too.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#13I've been using "install this webpage as an app" in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn't need to have an app manifest or service worker to use the feature, you can just use it with any site. I also develop a Web-based VR app at work, have been doing WebXR and VR development for a while now.
The two experiences together have me about convinced that tabs in the browser were a mistake. The operating system already has a means of managing multiple documents/app views, and that is just windows.
It's disturbing that every browser has to implement most of their own media decoders, instead of relying on an OS level API and writing plugins for it. We have file systems for organizing our saved things. Bookmarks should just be links files on disk. You wouldn't need to have in-browser sync of your bookmarks, you'd just point it to your bookmarks directory and let Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever sync the files.
If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop.
We might be able to integrate different apps better, things like standardize an interface for image editors, let developers build to that interface, let users select their preferred editor, and have much more powerful image editing available in every app that wants to work with images. We might be able to have VR home environments where web apps represent objects within the user's environment, rather than exclusive mode, full "experiences".
And having this ecosystem on desktop would make users expect to have this functionality everywhere. Smartphone OS vendors might find it a hard time to try to make walled garden, only-place-you-can-do-any-business-so-we-get-our-vig stores.
But we don't. And now browsers are seen as "impossibly complex" (except the SerenityOS team seems to be killing it with Ladybird). All because browsers implemented their own multiple document interface and took over control from what should have been OS-level concerns.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#14If we have to rethink the browser is not because of the UI. We have to take the browser to the smartphones ecosystem and dethrone app platforms.
Maybe, an app-able solution that mimicks most or all of the stuff one can get from developing for app platforms — because it would provide crossplatform, it would create the necessary incentive to develop for it. Also, user privacy first and open source.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#15Tried Arc, not my thing. Personally I want browsers to be developer originated, support massive amounts of protocols and playback formats, span over multiple layers of networks, debug tech stack issues as it should be. I don't bother tabs or bookmarks as I always choose to remember URLs with my head.
I am not against content creativity, but I really hope someone can re-invent Shockwave Flash, a container for streamable vector animation format. SVG and DOM canvas stuff are traumatic to work with and they always seem to burn my cpu0. Rich media should be so much richer & quicker instead of 20MB main.min.js barely movable renders like shit on a browser. We had better content experience with .swf players on a Pentium-III.
Players should entertain us, they should be designed as consumer-oriented software. But browsers are for productivity, they were supposed to browse a broad range of documents hosted on networks of variety, with absolute control and input.
Now the world is confusing these two, we are browsing a world of popups, paywalls and infinite scrolls. Arc might never be able to solve the problem here.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#16am i taking crazy pills? > Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI no one is ever going to dethrone chrome unless they start selling hardware filled with their crapware at a loss solely to suck ppl into the ecosystem and/or start giving away laptops as fast as possible for the same reasons & no one is ever going to compete with firefox or brave on UI…
Nobody thought anybody could dethrone IE when Firefox came around. I don't think the goal of Arc is to be the browser that everybody uses, so much to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users. With the industry standardizing (for better or worse) on a handful of rendering engines, it's not a big stretch to imagine a world where you can choose between different browsers and still experience the same web as everybod…
I'd argue that IE6 got worse and didn't keep up with developments while Firefox got consistently better. Firefox' problem as "only" that is was really slow and that's what Chrome solved.
Yet, I also think that a new UI doesn't really change the browser experience much. It must be a completely different UX.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#17Reinventing the browser should be simplifying it to only what it needs to be: executing + rendering remote code in a sandboxed window.
Make a new browser that is just WebGPU + WebAssembly, no more DOM. Would already run the next wave of games that will come targeting that.
Then for regular websites, have them deliver a HTML rendering engine written in Webassembly for how they want to be rendered. No more need to test websites on a range of browsers
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#18I would very much like to see someone move htmx-like hypermedia functionality into a browser.
While innovating around the chrome of the browser is certainly nice, it seems to me that hypermedia is just a few small tweaks away from being a viable alternative to the SPA approach for many applications, and it really wouldn't be much code at all to support.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody thought anybody could dethrone IE when Firefox came around. I don't think the goal of Arc is to be the browser that everybody uses, so much to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users. With the industry standardizing (for better or worse) on a handful of rendering engines, it's not a big stretch to imagine a world where you can choose between different browsers and still experience the same web as everybod…
I'd argue that IE6 got worse and didn't keep up with developments while Firefox got consistently better. Firefox' problem as "only" that is was really slow and that's what Chrome solved. Yet, I also think that a new UI doesn't really change the browser experience much. It must be a completely different UX.
Firefox came at a time when the web was really annoying to use, and had features to make it better. I don't think IE had even shipped a pop-up blocker at the time. But FireFox's extensibility also made things like ad blockers and Grease Monkey scripts possible, which was the only way to stay sane as a power user in that era. And tabs! That was a big one.
I think the web has gotten annoying again, in different ways, because of the thousand things that nag you on every website to click to close them or otherwise obstruct your reading (cookie banners, too). If a browser can solve that reliably, I'd switch to it.
Re: The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody thought anybody could dethrone IE when Firefox came around. I don't think the goal of Arc is to be the browser that everybody uses, so much to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users. With the industry standardizing (for better or worse) on a handful of rendering engines, it's not a big stretch to imagine a world where you can choose between different browsers and still experience the same web as everybod…
> to be a useful browser for a lot of power-users fair, but in that case they should be showcasing their security and privacy focused initiatives, and their source of angel funding... otherwise how will it be anything other than spyware crap that funds itself by selling your data?? no group of power users will flock to a new browser without any transparency on the above
I imagine they'll charge money. Mighty's $30/month is a bit out of my price range, but given that I spend ~70% of the workday in a browser, if one could improve my productivity the amount I'd pay for it isn't nothing.