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Arc Browser 1.0

arc.net

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Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#211

Post by skulk »

zsims wrote: post #145
prmoustache wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want your browser to manage themes and window management (tiling, links outside of web) while it is the job of the OS/desktop environment?

Doesn't that argument apply to tabs also? Eg IE6 days where there were no tabs, and everything was deferred to the OS/desktop window management. It was clunky and painful.

I consider that an indictment of window management, not browser UIs.

I used [0] to use EXWM + qutebrowser in tabs_are_windows [1] mode. Being able to switch between tabs/open files/IRC rooms/whatever else emacs can do with fuzzy buffer searching felt like computer enlightenment.

[0]: EXWM runs in emacs's normal lisp environment which sometimes blocks the thread that EXWM listens for events on... this is obviously untenable and I never got around to finding out how to avoid this

[1]: https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#tabs.tabs_are...

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#213

Post by wkdneidbwf »

38 wrote: post #207
freediver wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone, including you, can check that is not true. That is the beauty of a zero-telemetry claim.

its closed source...

yes, but you can analyze the traffic from the app if you cared too. the point is that you absolutely can verify their claims.

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#214

Post by wkdneidbwf »

i’ve tried arc a couple times and never got to the “aha!” moment. in a lot of ways arc reminds me of software from the early 2000’s that tried to do everything.

i think they’re doing some interesting stuff, but i just couldn’t find features or workflows that were safari-killers for me.

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#215

Post by [deleted] »

rogerclark wrote: post #164
thiht wrote: post #114

I’ve used Arc as my main browser on my work laptop for the last few months and I love it! It solves pain points I’ve actively tried to solve with Firefox, but couldn’t. It’s no surprise HN is skeptical about « yet another browser », so here’s what I like specifically about Arc: - it supports tab tiling. I can see 2 tabs next to one another easily. This is NOT solved with window tiling, it’s clunky and clutters the sp…

Arc is pretty good. The vertical tabs are great, and the same tab list appears in all other windows you have open. For someone who easily loses track of tabs, this helps dramatically, and prevents the situation where you have multiple windows open, each with similar tabs. The other great feature is the "Little Arc" window that appears when opening links in other apps. This lets you check something out, close the wind…

[deleted]

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#216

Post by sxdgfcbugh »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #174
rogerclark wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arc is pretty good. The vertical tabs are great, and the same tab list appears in all other windows you have open. For someone who easily loses track of tabs, this helps dramatically, and prevents the situation where you have multiple windows open, each with similar tabs. The other great feature is the "Little Arc" window that appears when opening links in other apps. This lets you check something out, close the wind…

Why wouldn't they do Linux? Isn't the whole benefit of browsers that they're the internet's compatibility layer, and shouldn't support be kinda baked into Chromium? Missing a chunk of (hopefully passionate in a good way) users like that sounds like a missed opportunity. That said it's probably fine for them to iterate for Mac customers first, like apps releasing on iOS first before supporting Android.

[dead]

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#217

Post by bob778 »

wkdneidbwf wrote: post #213
38 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its closed source...

yes, but you can analyze the traffic from the app if you cared too. the point is that you absolutely can verify their claims.

I’ve worked on projects that logged locally and only transmitted every ~60 days when they detected the right network (eg public wifi). So unless you monitor it continuously and permanently this isn’t true.

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#218

Post by perryizgr8 »

prmoustache wrote: post #141
thiht wrote: post #114

I’ve used Arc as my main browser on my work laptop for the last few months and I love it! It solves pain points I’ve actively tried to solve with Firefox, but couldn’t. It’s no surprise HN is skeptical about « yet another browser », so here’s what I like specifically about Arc: - it supports tab tiling. I can see 2 tabs next to one another easily. This is NOT solved with window tiling, it’s clunky and clutters the sp…

Why would you want your browser to manage themes and window management (tiling, links outside of web) while it is the job of the OS/desktop environment?

Because it works better like this.

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#219

Post by dlivingston »

jwells89 wrote: post #208
kajecounterhack wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they do Linux? Isn't the whole benefit of browsers that they're the internet's compatibility layer, and shouldn't support be kinda baked into Chromium? Missing a chunk of (hopefully passionate in a good way) users like that sounds like a missed opportunity. That said it's probably fine for them to iterate for Mac customers first, like apps releasing on iOS first before supporting Android.

As I understand, Arc doesn’t use the UI framework that’s baked into Chromium and instead uses SwiftUI. To facilitate a Windows port, they’re building on existing community work to write a SwiftUI implementation for Windows. Following this if they were to port to Linux they’d probably write a GTK-based SwiftUI implementation, or if they wait for Swift C++ interop perhaps a Qt-based implementation.

> To facilitate a Windows port, they’re building on existing community work to write a SwiftUI implementation for Windows.

Can you expand on this? I haven't the foggiest idea how this would work in practice.

Re: Arc Browser 1.0

#220

Post by fragmede »

tazjin wrote: post #134
fragmede wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's value on the wrapper around the rendering engine. Presumably you don't use the raw engine, and use many of the UX features provided by your chosen wrapper (of which there are many). Things like tabs and extensions, hell even having history, settings, cookies, and a back button are UX niceties a raw engine doesn't necessarily provide. So the wrapper is important; making a better wrapper is thus a worthwhile en…

> it's easy to see a hypothetical consumer-focused browser that restored that functionality, or had it natively would easily be worth millions And where would those millions come from? Make the browser paid? It could work if it's really that good, and it'd likely be targeted at Apple users who won't mind paying. Seems risky though, eventually if you're too popular, Google will just copy some superficial stuff you're…

> Make the browser paid?

That's an interesting question! Paying for things is the obvious answer, but us users have been trained to feel entitled to not paying for other people's hard work. So the most interesting one in the space of "how to get people to pay for a web browser" is Replay.io, which is "just" a firefox re-skin (it's infinitely more than that) selling to a niche audience that is known for being cheap. So rather than sell to them directly, sell to their employers (it's a business tool) and get into the enterprise space, which is its own can of worms. It's a ridiculously powerful tool, if only their target market could manage to hold it correctly.

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