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Thoughts on Arc Browser
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#22Giving all my passwords, bookmarks and possibly browser history and credit card information to a closed source browser from an unknown company sounds too risky for me. How do they even plan to make money?
That's a good point about monetisation. I did wonder how they plan on making money, but to be honest, I didn't do much research on that topic.
I asked this question through their in product feedback form and got this response:
> Arc is currently free, and we'll always have some version of the product that is free. In the future, we'll charge for premium and team features.
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
From where I sit, browser engines are commodities. There's not notable differentiation to be had there. Are four actively-developed, open source, mainstream browser engines enough? I think so, given that we haven't seen a downside to a relative monoculture in open source operating systems.
Which are the four? I count Chromium, Gecko and WebKit.
One day I discovered an independent engine: LibWeb (Ladybird Browser) which is developed from scratch. Quite brillant guys and effort.
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#24Giving all my passwords, bookmarks and possibly browser history and credit card information to a closed source browser from an unknown company sounds too risky for me. How do they even plan to make money?
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Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
From where I sit, browser engines are commodities. There's not notable differentiation to be had there. Are four actively-developed, open source, mainstream browser engines enough? I think so, given that we haven't seen a downside to a relative monoculture in open source operating systems.
Which are the four? I count Chromium, Gecko and WebKit.
I counted Goanna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software)
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#26I've used it, it's fine I guess, nothing super outstanding. I don't want to be that guy on HN, but the way they market themselves as being some revolution in browsing while simply wrapping Chrome like others like Vivaldi (which also has a lot of customization), Edge, Opera etc is not that interesting. It's even less so when I would lose adblocking due to Manifest v3 because, really, how long will these browser makers…
From where I sit, browser engines are commodities. There's not notable differentiation to be had there. Are four actively-developed, open source, mainstream browser engines enough? I think so, given that we haven't seen a downside to a relative monoculture in open source operating systems.
> Are four actively-developed, open source, mainstream browser engines enough? I think so, given that we haven't seen a downside to a relative monoculture
We have a near-monopoly with Chrome, a very distant second Safari, and a nearly non-existent Firefox. Anything else (like Goanna or Flow) have literally zero impact.
Chrome's outsized influence is such that it no longer even pretends to care about consensus or processes at w3c and just ships random features at neck-breaking speed.
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#27I've used it, it's fine I guess, nothing super outstanding. I don't want to be that guy on HN, but the way they market themselves as being some revolution in browsing while simply wrapping Chrome like others like Vivaldi (which also has a lot of customization), Edge, Opera etc is not that interesting. It's even less so when I would lose adblocking due to Manifest v3 because, really, how long will these browser makers…
I envision a browser inspired by the likes of foobar2k in which core engines are open source and interchangeable, and any browsing experience is achievable through a rich plugin and layout system. The browser itself would be little more than scaffolding and an SDK.
That's more or less what manifest v2 allows for. But, you can use that to block ads. It simply had to go!
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which are the four? I count Chromium, Gecko and WebKit.
One day I discovered an independent engine: LibWeb (Ladybird Browser) which is developed from scratch. Quite brillant guys and effort.
Ladybird isn't mainstream. So it doesn't count in this list.
Blink (Chromium) and WebKit are also closely related as the former is a fork of the later.
So there are effectively only two "independent" engines.
But in reality there is actually none. Both engines exist through Google money.
Given that most people can't even tell the difference between the internet and the web (hello, Arc developers!) and the web became the new all encompassing platform (like MS Windows was before) we have here a very dangerous concentration of power. Almost all private computing is controlled end-to-end by Google these days.
If Microsoft got almost split up for having way less power Google is long long overdue for a divestiture. Should this ever happen (I suspect the US would not give up control of personal computing all over the world so it's imho unlikely, but if) everybody would recognize quite fast how bad the mono-culture in the browser space really is…
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#29I absolutely love Arc. The way I used chrome was I had a separate window with tabs for relevant workflows instead of one tab with 30 windows. I'd always lose where the tab was and just open a new tab basically until my computer required a reboot. With Arc I have 5 spaces each with the 10 most used tabs pinned. I now have 3 windows, Arc + Slack + Zoom. I know where everything is...
This, 100%. Arc's best feature is eliminating window management if you're the type who keeps a tree of research open, and the command bar means you get to any point in the graph without having to remember 'where did I put that'? Easel and notes behavior is the cherry on top for keeping thoughts together with those branches. It's a much, much more useful superset of behavior that obsoletes bookmarks and multiple windows with various tabs.
But admittedly, this is a very power user feature set that makes it alluring to me, I would expect most people won't find those useful, and tab hoarders in particular will be VERY confused and frustrated when the archive feature vacuums up all the tabs they didn't pin in a space 12 hours after they last looked at it (the default, which can be extended but not disabled).
If you're not that high sprawl but organized type though, and are on macOS, I'd recommend Orion browser[0] if you still want a non-ugly and native vertical tab bar implementation with your browser that also supports webRequest API and is both fast and better with energy use since it uses WebKit. They also have a public bug tracker [1] and a responsive discord.
Re: Thoughts on Arc Browser
#30I've been using Edge on Windows, macOS, and Android for the past year or so and have been really happy with it. I signed up for Arc and haven't gotten an invite yet but, looking at this article, it doesn't really seem to be that much of a game changer? At least not as much as the pretentiousness of "The Browser Company of New York" (gag) would have you think.
Edge has vertical tabs with the exact same "pinned tab" system. You can also switch back to horizontal tabs if you so wish. It also has tab grouping, password/history/extension syncing etc. etc. With the huge added bonus that it's available on all of my machines and phones, syncing across all of them (and giving what I'm sure is an uncomfortable amount of data to MSFT...)
The only "missing" feature would be the command bar which, even as a "browser power user", I don't see any use for. How is it any better than the usual omnibox?