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 space.
- it’s vertical tab support is good, and beautiful. Firefox also has vertical tabs via Sidebery and TreeStyleTab, but it’s pretty awful. It hacks on side panels to implement something looking like tabs, but the look and feel honestly sucks
- theming is very easy and beautiful. Also it works by « space »
- lots features dedicated to avoiding tab cluttering:
1. Tabs can auto close when inactive
2. Links that should open a new tab don’t open a new tab by default, they open a pop-in that I can expand to a dedicated tab if I want
3. Links outside of Arc (in a mail client, in a terminal…) don’t open a new tab, they open in a unique Arc window (Little Arc), and I can expand them in a dedicated tab if I want
4. Spaces and profiles allow to organize the tabs properly
- it also integrates with a few websites, for example it can display infos directly on some non-open tabs. On my GitHub tabs, it shows the number of PRs awaiting my review. If I hover on my Google Agenda tab, it display a small agenda for the day without opening a tab
I’m sure I forget a few things that I like. None of these features individually would make me switch to Arc, but seeing all of it at once made me try it, and I don’t regret it.
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 window, and resume what you were doing, preventing you from getting sucked into the Web and away from the conversation you were having.
I don't find much else compelling, but these are both really nice. For some reason, I don't care at all about the tiling system or the Boosts feature (modifying pages to remove elements, change fonts, etc) even though people talk about those a lot. If they can think of one or two more really useful features (and communicate them properly on the website) then they'll gain a lot of users.
At least, they'll gain a lot of users on the Mac. The biggest downside is the lack of Windows and Linux support. They're working on Windows. I don't see them doing Linux at all, but who knows.
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.
Well Swift already builds on Windows, but obviously that does not come with much of what you might use to write a Mac app. The biggest holes to fill are those not covered by the open source version of Foundation (which thankfully, Apple is working on filling) and those left by the absence of AppKit/SwiftUI. So most of their hole-plugging is going to be centered around SwiftUI and whatever bits of AppKit beyond SwiftUI they may be using.
The SwiftUI API is mostly "just" a DSL built with result builders[0] and should be reproducible without too much trouble. The harder part is reimplementing all of the behavior concerning diffing, rendering, etc, and actually drawing the widgets. Last I knew, their plan is to use community built WinRT/WinUI Swift bindings (perhaps this[1]) as a starting point to marry native Windows widgets to their recreated API. It may be necessary to write some widgets from scratch though, because there are several types that WinUI currently lacks.
It's a gargantuan task they've taken on, but I'm watching intently because despite being the world's most popular platform, the native Windows dev story is currently pretty underwhelming.
I find programming user interfaces in SwiftUI to be an absolute joy, and if there were proper bindings to GTK and WinUI then it would be my go-to GUI framework for time immemorial.
The SwiftWinRT project looks interesting -- unfortunately, it seems to be abandoned (last commit was ~1 year ago).
Here's hoping they succeed. If they do, it could totally displace Qt as the standard cross-platform GUI framework (caveat - not for all use cases, of course).
Curious, what display/screen size are you mostly using?
I find TST quite hard to use on a Macbook / Laptop screen... it's much better on a bigger screen though, and best when using a second/separate display/window for it.
When only using the MacBook, I make use of ctrl-uparrow to switch between browser and VSCode. I have tree style tabs in the Firefox sidebar, not a separate window.
To be clear maybe the term « awful » was a bit harsh, I don’t want to shit on TST/Sidebery, I know the limitations they face on Firefox. I said it multiple times, but I’m mad that seeing the relative success of TST/Sidebery in their add on catalog, Mozilla didn’t invest anything in experience around vertical tabs, and tabs in general. Arc is fundamentally a big rethinking of what tabs should/could be in a browser.
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?
Part of the reason is that this is a macOS browser. macOS's window management is a joke. But I think I'd use the tab tiling on Linux too, I do a lot of work with tiled browser windows and it's great, but also sucks when you want to have a window very small horizontally and the browser's UI gets squished along with any extension menus you're trying to use. Arc doesn't have that problem, you always have access to the full UI.
Arc specifically has that problem. I use a tiling window manager on macOS (guess what, they exist!) and Arc doesn't play nice with it, specifically because of the vertical-only tab bar.
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
It should. Browser developers started introducing tabs because OS like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS were lagging in term of UX but that doesn't mean this is where it should ideally go. This was just bandaid.
I think tab tilling in Arc is only good if you use ultrawide screen and/or stay in browser for your workflow, other wise it's yet another layer of window management (windows, tabs, tiles in windows) you have to remember.
When you use smaller screen it would be good if instead of resizing the tiles to try to fit the sreen, maybe keep them the same size but alow horizontal scroll to go through them?
With Firefox on macOS and to a lesser extent Windows there’s some jank at play, for example when hiding/showing the sidebar you sometimes see a white flash as it redraws. It feels a bit duct taped together.
In case you are interested in a wrapper for WebKit instead of for Chromium, but one that lets you use your favorite Chrome and Firefox extensions:
Orion Browser by Kagi: Very fast. Zero telemetry.
Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions.
Orion supports Firefox and Chrome browser extensions natively. Whether you prefer getting them from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-Ons... as well as bringing support for as many as we can to iOS…
You can use a network capture util and will find that there is no telemetry. There’s an update check but you can disable it.
Don’t think it’s much different to use a closed source application than it is to use an open source app that somebody else compiled and put into your systems package repository.
Orion and Kagi (subscription search engine) are both great products, been using them for over a year, though I main FF.
>Don’t think it’s much different to use a closed source application than it is to use an open source app that somebody else compiled and put into your systems package repository.
What about the fact that in the case of the open source application, there are people not directly motivated to not mention problems for the good of the company, with the ability to look at the source code?
Imagine being more eager to review a thousand lines of code, which of course you can follow all the code paths, rather than just pull up the gui of a network monitor.
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.
I know open source projects that update their code every 30 days. Unless you're continuously and permanently monitoring every patch of every library then this isn't true.
Run the Debian Stable version and you're spared such churn. The version you're running may lag the current one by a few points but that is a small price to pay for relative stability (as in 'know your daemons'). Security fixes are backported but new functionality is not. While not a perfect guarantee - remember the weak key debacle - this strategy does provide a stable baseline which, in contrast to proprietary software [1], can be audited for telemetry/data leaks/etc.
[12] yes, yes, yes, it is possible to run that proprietary tool through Ghidra (et al) to look for nasties as well but this is far harder, you don't just run a diff between two binaries.
i mean, sure... but lets ignore whatever malware project you were working on. :)
lot of businesses live or die on the trust of their customers. don't they? arc's product is aimed at power users. surely if they were collecting telemetry and then trying to hide the fact they were transmitting it would be a critical blow when discovered.
so while i totally agree that they _could_ operate like that, in most cases there is very little to be gained and a lot to be lost by being intentionally deceptive.
so this will kind of diverge on what we consider as "proof", but i don't think that the software would need to be permanently monitored for a reasonable assurance.
This is great, with the one big annoyance that they don't use the actual native iCloud password keychain (and so, for example, can't interop with how that's also used to auto-fill passwords for apps on iOS, not just websites).
That is by design of Keychain, apps can not access each others keychain, otherwise it would not be secure. There is no "iOS system level keychain" but all apps use a bucket in keychain - Safari uses one and Orion uses one.
The design of “passwords” on the Mac and iOS doesn’t make it seem like anything is a “safari” password.
You save a password to the keychain in safari, and then you go to the “passwords” system preferences panel and you see those passwords. Or the other way around—creating a password from system preferences makes it accessible in browser. It appears on the surface to just be a password app, not a safari bucket.
It also works this way if you use the iCloud passwords app from windows. All of your saved passwords show up there as well, despite the absence of safari.
I’m pretty sure the new Chrome extension also shares your existing passwords.
I think it’s a reasonable assumption that when an app claims to use the keychain that you will have access to all your previously saved passwords.
Safari uses the Apple bucket, that is also exposed through the Apple's Chrome extension and also when you go to System preferences Passwords pane.
When you view passwords in Orion, you are also viewing passwords saved on Keychain, just in this case Orion's bucket.
There are various system API's that allow apps to read from each other's bucket (obviously all Apple apps have access to Apple's keychain bucket). This is how you can autofill passwords from different keychains in Orion (for example Apple's - which I call Safari's because this is how typically passwords land in it).
While I started this by giving you the plug .. the lack of it being the same password bucket combined with not getting 1Password to play nice, is what prevents me from making daily use, or rolling it out across my engineering employee base. I really like it otherwise.
That is a deal breaker for me. I use auto-fill extensively and my browsing is 50/50 Mac and iPad so having a separate set of passwords on Mac and iPad is super annoying.
I tried Orion a while ago: in that version background tabs with YouTube on pause made the bottom of my m1 air get very hot. I really liked that it supported chrome extensions but battery life was not great. I’ll give it another go now that I’ve been using arc for some time.
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 endeavor. Extensions only go so far, and if ManifestV3 ever lands, and stops ad-blocking extensions from functioning, it's easy to see a hypothetical consumer-focused browser that restored that functionality, or had it natively would easily be worth millions.
The only question is if they can actually make money, and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that. Opera, the browser company had revenue of around $380 million last quarter, but if you don't use their browser, which is also "just" a chrome wrapper, you'd never know it.
To put it another way, Linux distros; Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc, are all "just" wrappers around the Linux Kernel. Yet "I made a Linux Kernel wrapper" is worth at least a billion, in the case of Red Hat. If you never come near that distro, you might not even see a reason for its value, but you can't argue with their sales numbers.
> 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 doing and people will forget about you.
> and the kind of money that VC investment demands at that
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.
Personally, I consider this switch to Chromium solidified Chrome and derivatives dominance - with Presto-based Opera there was always a choice. It's also a shame they didn't released the code of this engine.
The context of the statement was different, and you took it to a whole different level. A browser wrapper is a wrapper by any other name. Linux is different.
I understand this reaction, but you're missing the point. It's precisely that the rendering engine is not what drives value; it's what you build on top of that sediment layer.
Why do people care so much about the rendering engine? They are also basically the same for most websites people actually care about, the important part is the UI.
That being said I’d strongly prefer the native WebKit be used since it wouldn’t make the thing 300mb.
Lots of things are built on FOSS components. How many appliances are built on nix-with-an-app? Are they just wrappers? What about Linux distros themselves, or all nix flavors and distros?
The value, in this case, is in the UI. The engine is a commodity.
The value isn't in the browser engine, it's in the implementation and the user experience.
I don't love Arc -- I bounced off it pretty fast -- but it's not insane to think that a VC would see the reuse of the most common browser engine as a good thing, as it means less work on the part of the developers and more of a focus on what sets the browser apart.
I think this is the Ouroboros of curiosity - discovery, investigation, disappointment, amnesia. If it doesn't catch, we don't really remember it. This seems very human.
I'm like that with a couple of hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the area that people hype, but aren't actually good. I forget their names and visit every few years.
> A browser, un no circumstances, should be log-in walled.
Why? Not that Arc does this, but in today's modern world, we're two device creatures; a smartphone and a laptop. How do you connect the two if not with some sort of login?
In my view, the name "The Browser Company of New York" feels cheerful and evokes an old-timey, skilled craftsmen feel. They do care a lot about storytelling and their brand, and their relationship to their users.
It should not be required if you do not want sync across devices, bug reports, etc (or if you just want to copy the configuration by yourself instead). However, apparently it requires anyways, and that is no good. It also should not require an internet connection if you are only going to view local files and/or LAN.
Their website still doesn't tell me anything useful enough about the browser to let me know if it's something that would interest me. It's all just marketing-speak.
This has been my primary issue with Arc. I can't tell what it is and the copy on the website reads like it comes from the world's most pretentious designer. I feel like any tech blogger covering this can't be taken seriously when they say "I just decided to give Arc a try because of how it looks" when there were 0 pictures on the website and the intro heading was literally "Arc is a browser". Okay Arc.
Agreed. I don't use a Mac anymore, but I've been hearing about this browser and how excellent it is, but their website does such an awful job of conveying anything that I'm surprised anyone ever started using it. Actually, to give them some credit, they seem to have redone the site somewhat, and it now actually has screenshots. Last time I visited it barely had a description of the product, so I guess they're headed in the right direction.
The Youtuber MKBHD has a podcast[0] where they have mentioned that many in their office has switched over to it. I'm not sure I quite understand their enthusiasm for it, but I don't think they're paid shills.
the venn diagram of people who say Arc is good, and people who say NordVPN is good, is a circle.
maybe not everybody who says arc is good is being paid to say that. but they are all people who accept money to say things like "arc is good". MKBHD included.
Everything about this browser reminds me of Apple's product pages. All marketing speak, vague, empty promises, and loads of hype everywhere for things I'm doing already on what I have right now.
It worked for Apple so I can't blame them for trying, but it makes the entire thing feel so empty.
It looks like someone mashed the basic features Microsoft built into Edge into a a frame around Webkit with one or two cool features.
I don't want to go all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 but Microsoft Edge seems to be doing most of the features this browser seems to have and more, and it's from a software company I expect to still exist in five years.
Can't watch video right now, but the blog isn't helpful. I just want to know about the browser, not all the navel-gazing around the browser. But, since another commenter mentioned you need an account to use the browser at all, it doesn't matter anyway.
What's the point with a bunch of information when you can just download it and try for yourself? If you're at the car dealership, don't you want to take a car for a test ride first, before getting into more details?
Because you want to know what it is like before installing it? From what I gather so far this is not an executable I trust and feel comfortable running on my personal computer.
Back in the day, it would take ages to download and install software, and it could mess up your system. If now was then, I'd see your point.
But if you don't trust a software, then you should never install it, and you should never ask for reinsurance from the software makers. If their goal is to compromise personal computers, then they will also lie in any information they put out.
It's like being at a car dealer that you think is a criminal, and asking him to double-pinky swear that the car you're looking at wasn't stolen.
The best way to learn about a browser is to use it. No article is going to convey whether it will feel right to you. If needing an account is a dealbreaker, the consider the deal broken and move on. I've tried out a bunch of browsers over the past year, and Arc has been my default for a few months now. Being able to easily swipe between sandboxed profiles is great, and I like the rest of the UI. They also have a YouTube channel[1] that will give you some idea of how it behaves; scroll to the earlier ones.
- "We never sell your data, and we’ll only share it in the following circumstances: With our Service Providers" O yeah they don't sell just share ... (with a list of what a Service provider may be but not what it may not be).
- "Why do we collect personal data? Protect against fraud" strange would have not listed that first.
And no amount of using it will change anything for those points.
> So what we are supposed to shut up and move on ?
Only if you have better things to do. I've personally cleared my day to work on a "CharlesW DESTROYS Arc Browser SaaS Model for 43 Minutes" YouTube response.
Well I certainly come to HN because some people take the time to criticize.
Share the link when you are finished with your video it might interest me since with a quick perusal of the website I couldn't find anything on their SaaS model.
I just mean that some people will value things like being able to sync their browser sidebar, and won't be bothered by needing an account to do so, and some people will never do that. If you're of the latter sort, then Arc isn't for you.
A browser that requires an account to use? No thanks.
The "why do i need an account" popup doesn't properly explain it to me either, syncing should be optional - let me use, or at least try, it without an account first.
Why? Of course so they can have their "registered users" count as high as possible to get another round of VC funding, so that they can drag this thing all the way to the IPO and get a nice and fat exit :)
This is going to sound like a negative comment but I promise it's not ...
Something really gets under my skin with the way they talk about Arc on their website. There is nothing on their website that means anything. Previously the headline of their website was literally "Arc is a browser". Are you kidding?
It then went on to say that it's everything I care about. Really? How is that? What do I care about? Are you sure you know what I care about? Then finally it asks me if I'm ready to let go of the old internet.
If you're going to say stuff like this, I think most of us at least on HN would expect them to be doing something where the benefits are very apparent. Or at the least, they'd have rebuilt the browser from the ground up. It's built on Chromium and therefore will have similar issues and limitations.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Chromium, I'm happy to use such a browser but I think it's time Arc decided to explain what their goal is using English, or something we can actually understand.
I see it as marketing that tries to make you feel like you want the browser, without telling you what actually makes it great. You can attract users with hype and FOMO, but I'm not sure how long those users will stay...
I feel like a lot of these features would bode well on the operating system level, rather than the browser level. If I’m someone who uses the same device for both work and personal use, I’m going to want more changes than just which bookmarks I use or which sites are logged in. That’s why both Windows & Macs have their Focus modes, or, for even more advanced use, different Users altogether, to separate all of my programs (or “apps”) depending on what I’m doing.
Changing the color of my browser isn’t really something I find worthwhile. Nor is moving the URL bar to the left; my monitor is more wide than tall, so it’s easier on my eyes and for moving my mouse to just look up as opposed to the left for navigation.
Competing against Chrome is interesting, although it’s still powered by Chromium, so nothing changes there. They are still at the mercy of features Google decides are worth pursuing, rather than W3C.
I've been using Arc for a few months now and find myself really missing it when I use other browsers.
This is due to a number of things, like the degree of UI polish and a UX I personally find very intuitive, but I think the biggest factor comes down to their features around tab management. Namely the following:
1. Tabs closing automatically by default unless explicitly pinned
2. Being able to group pinned tabs into folders
3. Pinned tabs remembering their original state (e.g. if I pin a tab, then navigate to some other page, I can click the favicon to return to the original page I pinned)
4. The ability to rename tabs to make them more meaningful
5. Organizing tabs into an easily-collapsible sidebar
6. Having multiple spaces for different "contexts"
These features may not be particularly novel, and I'm sure they could be easily replicates w/ extensions or add-ons, but the fact that things work like this by default and are super easy to manage feels pretty fantastic.
As an example, I recently started rewriting my neovim config, and created a new space called "neovim config" so I could quarantine the tab clutter away from my normal browsing. Then I pinned the GitHub page for my old config so I could reference it easily. And lastly I created folders for "installed plugins", "required plugins" and "optional plugins" to help me organize the GitHub pages of all the plugins I've already installed, plan to install, or merely want to test out. Then if I run into any bugs or need to reference Lua syntax I can open a bunch of ephemeral tabs to stack overflow or whatever and easily clean them up once I'm done.
I know I'm probably sounding like an Arc shill at this point, but I do genuinely feel like Arc is helping me get this work done more efficiently whereas I feel like just about any other browser would be getting in my way. The simplest way I could describe it is it's almost like Trello and Safari had a baby that somehow inherited the best qualities of each, with none of the drawbacks.
Ctrl+F "Vivaldi" -- no relevant comments? Vivaldi is impossibly excellent. How is Arc getting so much more attention?
Want vertical tabs? Vivaldi. Side bar? Vivaldi. Workspaces? Vivaldi. Mouse gestures? Vivaldi. Vertical space? Vivaldi. Customizable speed dial? Vivaldi. Keyboard commands? Popout mini-browser? Encrypted sync? Page tiling? Chrome extensions? Multiple types of tab groups? Excellent tools for inspection, screenshotting, etc.? Total anonymity? Everything comes up Vivaldi.
And what's more, Vivaldi actually works for the USER. They spoof their ID (due to Google sabotage) that lets us use Bing Chat without switching to Chrome. They don't even ask for your email address, unlike Arc. They'll GIVE you an email system for free. Vivaldi's openly committed to rejecting Google's Manifest v3 that cripples user control over what information is collected by Google and what extensions a user can use in their own browser.
And yet Vivaldi receives virtually no attention or praise. And Arc has been showered with it for years, despite never shipping a product until today. It's... very strange. This browser is everything I could ever dream of, and it doesn't get a fraction of the attention that Firefox, Brave, or Chrome gets.
Link for Vivaldi, from the same people behind the original Opera: https://vivaldi.com
Thanks, I used to use Vivaldi many years ago (switched by to Firefox eventually). I just tried it again and unfortunately their user inteface is very cluttered and not polished by default - comparing to Arc.
In Vivaldi
1. Everything is very very tiny. You have to google there is zoom ui slider - but after changing to 130% I finally have nice padding but it scales all UI so now I endup with very big and fat icons and fonts. What's worse those icons, font looks like are just rasterized and because of that not sharp
2. Default selected tab and tab colors are very cluttered
3. Their command panel cmd+e is very cluttered and need to learn about new shortcut (I don't want to create notes, search history, bookmarks, I want to only search current open tabs, search engine, execute command or open by url. This panel also very tiny
4. Trash button doesn't work for me - doesn't do anything. I expected it will nuke all open tabs - last time I used vivaldi many years ago this was the final straw for me - closing like 50 tabs was taking like 5+ seconds.
Not to argue with personal taste, but I think most of these problems are just becoming accustomed to a different UI. Vivaldi is easily the most customizable browser on the market, and it's not even close. I don't work for Vivaldi and I'm not getting paid by them, just a fervent acolyte.
1) I'm not sure I understand. You don't like how small the icons are, so you made them larger, but then you don't like they're larger? Like you, I also like nice big hitboxes, and I haven't noticed any issues. If you're just trying to scale the webpage zoom, look at the bottom right corner of the status bar -- there's a zoom bar you can drag.
2) Try the Human theme, which changes colors to complement whatever webpage you're looking at. I absolutely love it. I use vertical tabs, which aren't cluttered; maybe the horizontal tabs are? If you don't like square tabs, you can round the corners to squircles in the settings.
3) The command panel works flawlessly for me to search current open tabs, bookmarks, etc. Maybe it's just a different implementation than Firefox?
4) The trash icon at the bottom of the vertical tabs isn't to close all tabs -- if you want to do that, just right-click any tab and select "close all tabs below." The trash icon is a SUPER useful recovery tool that stores your browsing history, essentially. If you accidentally close a tab or a window, you can just restore it by clicking the trash icon and selecting the closed tab/window in reverse chronological order.
Vivaldi today is what Firefox was twenty years ago -- just outstripping all competition and being an absolute joy for the end user. You can customize Vivaldi to be whatever you want it to be, and I think you'd really enjoy it as your default browser.
Arc has been a pleasant browser to use, has helped me rein in my hundreds of tabs, and has boosted my productivity. As a set of features, I feel like it's pushing forwards what browsing can be.
However, not every feature is a hit for me. I use the tab management extensively and enjoy the quick action toolbar. I don't see much of their quick-action integrations with particular websites but when I have seen them they've been nice to haves. I don't use the "easels" at all and don't see any need for them or problem they solve for me. I don't find the personalisation all that useful. This does all lead me to wonder if Arc is designed for me, or just happens to currently align well enough with my needs for me to find it valuable. Will they move in a direction away from what I need in the future? Maybe. I hope this is just a feature-maximalism strategy and that it continues to be useful for many in the long term, but I fear that it may become to the web what Hey is to email, where what I want is a more traditional Mimestream/Mail.app.
It is not pushing forwards what the web can be, as I feel many people in these comments are wanting or hoping for, and to be honest I think that's fine. It doesn't need to. We have Mozilla, Google, and Apple, each pushing forwards what the web is in their own ways, in healthy tension with each other.
It's disappointing that there's no Linux version. It's a little silly for them to build on top of a multi-platform browser and then eliminate support for 2 major platforms. I had been looking forward to trying this.
They haven't "eliminated" support for other platforms. They are actively working on them.
It seems they wanted to get an MVP out and chose MacOS first. It might be annoying for Windows/Linux users but there's nothing wrong with the approach.
Dammit, I thought this was about Arc language (the language/platform that HN uses, http://arclanguage.org/). Guess I'm stuck with using Anarki still.
More on topic, seems it's still a waitlist? I go to their page and see "Join Waitlist" and "Coming in Winter 2023", so maybe page hasn't been properly updated yet?
If I'm not mistaken Arc is also a closed source browser. The company has raised $18M since 2020. How are they expecting to make that RoI for their investors?
Monetisation for browsers is incredibly hard, and doing it in a way that respects the end user is even harder. Curious to see their play.
They started raising in 2020 for a browser, a no-hope project in a commoditized consumer market dominated by giants with strong network effects. The software might not be vapor but the money will definitely be.
It's not hard. Put a search box or three in the browser and make google and bing money. If you get users, you get money, it's that simple. Arc's problem isn't a business model, it's a user base. Firefox makes half a billion dollars a year in search revenue and a browser 1/10th that size could pay off $18M in debt in a few months.
They won’t be making anywhere near 1/10th of what Firefox makes, even with 1/10th of the user base, because those are highly specialised contracts.
Google typically won’t touch you at all (although the founders connections may help them here, but I could see that upsetting some of Google’s business partners). Almost every Google search partnership is a legacy one.
With Bing, you’re looking at a standard revenue share, of which they take a cut, and you’re at the whim of seasonality, not a fixed sum as say Firefox has.
Then, the investors won’t just want their investment back; they’ll want a proper return as well.
Like I’ve said, the monetization opportunities that respect the user are hard.
Avast made a killing with their browser, and they did that by selling user data.
The fact that they’re a closed source browser does not lend them any favours.
They're looking at PaaS-style monetization to start[1]: free for solo users, but teams looking to use Arc's collaborative features—none of which I think have been formally announced yet—will have to pony up.
I was interested I trying it out, downloaded it, run. It started with odd animation and then prompted me to sign up. The rationale was to "sync" (not interested) and bug reports (can submit data while doing it).
It feels worse than chrome while being obnoxious about supposedly being "groundbreaking"...
You can’t please all of the people any of the time. Arc is great in its rethinking of several aspects of how we’ve come to believe a browser should work. Bookmarks, because of the way Arc archives tabs, are very different in Arc … but no worse than the abyss in other browsers. I seldom peruse the 2500+ bookmarks & tend to just search. If a search product could search that abyss & the web I’d be in an echo chamber; it’s a fine line … but all browsers could do better especially the ones run by a search company. Arc has some features I’ll probably never use, too; but they’re not in the way.
Hopefully the competition bodes well for end users with open minds.
> Arc is built from the ground up to be private and secure. We don’t know what sites you visit or what you search for.
Immediately following this is a form for me to enter my email address so I can receive a download link. Sorry Arc, that’s not a trade I’m willing to make.
I think they show different buttons depending on your platform. If you visit from a mobile browser, it shows a "Get download link" button which asks for your email.
They presumably do this so that people can download it later from desktop using the emailed link. It's easy to mistake it as an attempt to harvest email IDs. The website could definitely use some text which indicates that it's Mac only at the moment.
Yeah their messaging is a bit strange. Perhaps someone with more info on Arc can clarify, but their landing page makes a strong point about them being privacy-conscious, and their summary of their own terms of service is "TLDR: we won't spy on you", but at the same time you must log in to use the browser. What is their monetization strategy? If something is VC-backed and free, it's hard to believe that they aren't ad supported in some way, which almost always relies on some amount of tracking.
In the end, when all the other attempts fail, they'll settle for what all the other browsers do, direct some search traffic to Google or Bing to get a fraction of those ad dollars. With enough users, this is a completely reasonable strategy for now.
I want to like Arc but I found the onboarding to be very weak. How did you learn to use it in the way the designers intended? Where is the "Master Arc in 5 Minutes" video?
I couldn't agree with you more. I've been using Arc for the past month or so and it's okay but my god it has a lot of 'stuff' to learn.
They have a few videos on their YouTube channel but they're not well made imho. They lack a proper script and are far too long because of the lack of proper structure.
I am surprised they released v1 without a few polished videos explaining their USPs.
That's very possible since I've had it for months, but I wasn't able to find it in the 1.0 app. It mystifies me why their marketing team wouldn't post these publicly to encourage people to try it.
I've been using it a few months now. It does some things really well - others not.
Great:
- Picture in Picture mode automatically when switching tabs from YT, Soundcloud, etc
- Swiping the trackpad with two fingers to switch profiles instantly
- Clean interface
- Clicking links opens a small window for you to quickly check the content, and if you want to continue you can maximise it, or you click the page in the background to return to the page you were on. Speeds up quick reads for me
- Much thought into where to put UI elements
- Some great shortcuts, like copying current URL (Command + Shift + C), clearing tabs (Command + Shift + K)
Bad:
- The sidebar design doesn't always play nice with websites
- The way you pin extensions is a bit annoying
- I bump into bugs sometimes since it's early days
- I have no interest in using their Notes, Easels or Download system (easily ignored tho)
- Settings have a very "startup-hype" membership card that serves no purpose, while also not having many settings for customisation. Weird choice imo
- No interest in the auto-archive feature, but impossible to turn off
Overall, I'm happy using it right now, and you can tell they put lots of effort into their updates, so I think it can become something quite good.
A suspend feature, like the low power mode, is good idea.
To edit text on page, I think that the web developer menu is many browsers would be suitable for such a purpose, and a separate menu for that seems unnecessary to me.
Allow copy/paste is good, although I would do it a bit differently. Similarly like many spreadsheet programs have the option for manual or auto calculation, to do that for web pages also; if set to manual calculation mode then nothing is calculated or sent to the server until you push send or recalculate, and most events are suppressed, so it cannot prevent you to copy/paste, nor can it spy on data that you have entered but chosen to not send yet. It would also improve speed and less power, and avoid problems with some forms that will put in a number automatically if you erase the number and make it difficult to enter the correct number due to that. So, it would solve ten problems at once.
"Open Page in Internet Archive" may be useful, but seems to me should be an extension rather than a built-in feature (although it could be an extension which is included by default).
However, some things that would be good to have in a web browser would be: User controlled request/response headers (this can make many other settings unnecessary, e.g. language, as well as anything that can be controlled by the Content-Security-Policy header, etc). Add user styles and user scripts (without needing to package an extension). Be able to use native code extensions (which must be installed manually and cannot be installed from the web service). Relative location bar mode. ARIA mode.
I use it daily. It feels like Safari, but with Chrome or Firefox extensions and a decent ad blocker. My only nit to pick is it doesn't integrate with the system passwords, but I moved to Bitwarden a few months ago and that works perfectly. It supports PWAs and nearly no-chrome windows which has been great for a few web apps I use.
I've not heard of this before so just checked it out. Looks quite nice. Amusingly this Orion browser has a far more slick and user friendly first run experience than Arc which is a huge complaint I've had about Arc.
I've been waiting on their implementation of Compact Tabs.
While controversial for some, I personally feel that the new compact tab designs in Safari are a far better user experience and use of space.
Kagi's CEO completely disagrees with this, and they're implementing a design similar to Internet Explorer 9.
I really want to use Kagi, but I think that their design principals are antithetical with mine and may others.
But, I think it's great for a lot of people, particularly those that seek alternative browsers.
I tried this many moons ago. Mostly because I like when people try out new UI ideas. It was interesting and well done, but ultimately did not replace Firefox for me. I don't know who it is for: it's good but not obviously better than the big players, so what are their plans for it?
Have they added proper bookmarks yet? That was a deal breaker when I used it last. You could pin/favorite tabs and such, but I could never find a way to store the bookmarks that are not regularly used, but I may need to bring up from time to time. I assume this is just a philosophical disagreement between myself and the Arc devs about how one should use a web browser
This was also the only reason that made be almost to bail until someone on reddit mentioned they are using raindrop.io extension as a bookmark manager that is cross platform. I pinned raindrop.io so that i can easily access it with a button and search in similar way as in firefox.
Otherwise without it Arc experience is bad:
1. importing ~5k of bookmarks (yes I use bookmarks as some link I might potentially find useful 1 year later and just tagging them like: "ml, model, ai stable, diffusion" so I can easily search for it even few years later) take very very long time
2. they all endup in folder as tabs and such big amount of bookmarks keeps left bar very slow
3. arc seem not to import tags from firefox
4. there is no bookmark manager were you can easily search by title, keywords, tags or sort by date
But where do those folders appear? Are they still visible in the sidebar? Because the whole purpose of saving those bookmarks, to me, is to remove visual clutter while still having them available when needed.
In my main space there's an "Imported Bookmarks" folder in the side bar. Yes it takes up 1 "tab space" but it's there, and doesn't really bother me. If you change spaces it's not there, so you can have "bookmarks" for each space, which is unique and beneficial if you use spaces for specific things.
That said, I primarily use Safari still, until other browsers adopt the SMS autofill of two factor codes it's going to be tough to leave Safari for personal use. Professional use I generally use chrome, as it's tied to our work google account.
If I wanted to keep using Arc but found this feature critical, I would make a Space with a single pinned folder that I put all the bookmarks under. Not super ergonomic, but just suggesting an idea to a fellow user.
Yeah, that's the option I was recommended when I was trying to use Arc. But to me that kinda feels like getting an Android phone and putting a launcher and skin on it to look like iOS. If I'm gonna switch, I want to switch because it works for me, not because I can coax it into behaving close enough to the way I want, you know? Especially for as radical change as Arc is proposing. So I just decided it wasn't for me, even if I like a lot of their other ideas.
So the feature you want is to hide bookmarks, because you can just put as many as you want under one folder. The bookmarks exist and you're making it sound like they dont.
I'm not making it sound like they don't, the bookmarks feature as it exists in every other major browser, doesn't exist in Arc, as this thread has affirmed for me. That's fine, if that's how they want their browser to work, but it makes it incompatible with how I use a browser, which is why I was asking if that had changed or not.
Agreed. It's mainlined a lot of plugins that I used to use in Chrome and default keyboard shortcuts that I would have chosen myself. Window management, spaces, and automated tab lifecycles are by far the most valuable features I use.
The Arc Browser Company raised $18M so far (via Crunchbase[1]).
It has been a while when I got the Arc Browser but I could not get myself to get used to the excessive feature. I personally am unable to figure out what to think about it. A younger me would have loved this browser but now, I'm (very personal) more of sticking to the basics/native and spend extra time learning the tips/tricks and the internals to be able to use a tool/system more effectively.
As YouTuber Chris Titus would very eloquently say, "it's pointless". Chrome with a bunch of plugins could probably replicate the same experience.
It's also kinda patronizing to say "here's how the browser should work" as if people are morons in 2023 and have no clue how to use a browser, let alone their supposed target audience. I'm not even touching the "sign up to continue" issue others mentioned...
The news should actually be they got $18M in funding for this (FFS).
I got both Arc and SigmaOS and ended up splitting my time between the status quo, Firefox, and SigmaOS. SigmaOS is fast and has an interesting concept but I have two decades of muscle memory with Firefox and SigmaOS uses a completely different set of shortcuts, which are admittedly reasonable on paper.
My biggest issue is still that i cannot export all the data in case i want to switch to something else or they fail. Apart from this the UI concept is really what we need to move browsers forward and the new approach to tabs vs windows vs bookmarks is genius.
i just tired it and its even worse: they dont use the chrome bookmarks store at all so you can export it but the bookmarks will just be completely empty!
I've used Arc probably 90% of the time for the past two months. One thing that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere (even in their literature): it's very lightweight on memory usage.
I've noticed recently that Safari uses 1/3 to 2/3 of a gigabyte for each youtube tab, or gmail, or <many other sites>.
Arc uses roughly 25% of that.
Also, Arc's efficiency as tabs build up seems to grow faster than Safari's although that's harder to quantify. But in concrete terms, Safari puts my M1 Air's memory into the yellow in activity monitor almost immediately. Arc regularly stays green with 20-30 tabs open.
There are other nice things to consider, but that's huge for me.
Interesting, I made the opposite observations on two different Macs. Safari, Edge, Chrome & Brave are all less resource hungry for me than Arc, including way worse energy impact / battery drain, unfortunately.
And I'm not alone either, looking at Reddit & Discord in the past.
Made me also switch away again recently. Would love to see them focus more on that instead of all those gimmicks. (Actually expected that before seeing them ship 1.0.)
Also, the way they handle extensions and especially the recent changes getting rid of the extension bar top right are/were also not great.
It’s not like I was very methodical about it, but the results were as plain as day. I mean, yellow vs. green isn’t hard to see. I’ll try the exact same sites/tabs from a fresh boot for safari, chrome and arc and report back.
I haven’t been in reddit since June — Apollo user, and old.reddit.com just sucks so hard.
What about extensions? I only installed a couple, but I had no problem. That
I've been using this browser all through the waitlist period and it's great!
Some of the decisions I don't like (my Bitwarden button is hidden by default which makes password filling hard - I don't have it fill automatically on page load), but overall I've enjoyed using it. My favourite features:
- split tabs (I prefer this over tiling in the WM)
- little arc
- PiP works very well for video calls
- I have a bunch of apps pinned (ChatGPT / Gmail / Calendar / Github) and a bunch of tabs below that
- I like the single action bar on Cmd-T
Overall, big fan, and I'd pay some amount for it probably.
I tried arc for a while and I didnt stick with it just because of the tiling. I just miss the flexibility of being able to have more than 3 windows visible in a useful orientation. For me it simply didnt work on a huge screen.
Arc's tab management philosophy is really interesting; Tabs are transient unless pinned. But, discarded tabs can still be easily found in an archive if necessary. Mini-Arc is browser pop-up window that is tab-less and (mostly) without any browser chrome for quick, read-once pages.
Their whole approach is great for minimalists (especially for someone like me with ADHD) but will probably be hated by the many tab hoarders on HN.
If nothing else, I hope Arc inspires other browser makers to think outside the box with stuff like this.
Solid experience over the last 6+ months. Very few crashes if at all. Transparent weekly updates (yay Thursdays). Can’t get enough of my split views and spaces. Kudos to the team
I'd say it's arrogance with genuine belief that they have this breakthrough idea about web browser UI/UX - hard to say technology because as others spotted, this thing is based on Chromium. And this belief perhaps justify enough naming themselves in some "we're the ones, the truly original" somewhat hipster fashion.
I don't see anywhere mentioned this browser having access to Chrome extensions so for me, even if I'd be slightly interested in testing this (and it would be still possible on my Intel Macbook) it's a hard miss. Not being able to block ads and tracking elements in 20s is out of the question and no fancy annotation or vertical tabs feature with grouping compensates this. Guess this thing aims at those who don't mind their privacy being violated - perhaps all sorts of influencers.
The only thing they got are Boosts which seem to be kind of user scripts feature
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.
I played around with it a bit. Seems like a nice browser, very clean. However this also raises some issues. For instance sometimes when i want to click some button on a website which is close to the border, the top or left bar pop up and i miss click.
it isn't mentioned anywhere but it's chromium based — which is of course is practical, but I wonder how dependent on Google that makes them and other browsers using it
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but why is this practical? It’s a Mac app, WebKit already ships with the OS and can be easily used with WKWebView. Bundling Chrome is a much bigger app size and much more complicated build setup than importing a class that ships with Cocoa.
Practical because they're also working on adding Windows support. Although it sounds like they're writing everything in SwiftUI and trying to port most of the Swift code to run on Windows? So not necessarily the most practical approach there either.
Not particularly. Almost every browser out there other than Firefox and Safari are using Chromium, Including Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi, so there's a large enough base that a fork could conceivably be created and maintained if needed.
privacy: would be nice if it didn’t send the UA header, does it? I think it’s time to get rid of any server side logic based on UA and this could be an opportunity to start
I don't think I want to have anything to do with this company. Super cringe.
I get the impression that Arc will be a form over function product reflecting someone's understanding of good design and insisting on it. Not that I'd use a closed source browser anyway.
They're definitely very ... spirited. The browser is good, though, and I know some people who say it's their favorite. It's got some neat power features, and I'm happy to see innovation in the browser space. Their spaces feature is very slick and the main thing I miss when using Orion. I wish them success.
This is the 12th link from this domain over last 10 months and it finally got enough attention to reach the main page with over 150 comments. About 7 months ago browser page had nothing but a field for an email address to put you on waiting list.
Cringe is an understatement… I would love to see a company that simply stated the point was to make money.
Finance companies feel no shame at this, why are tech companies so cringe with the mission and vision stuff?
It got baked into the silicon valley culture for some reason. When the rebellious innovators à la Wozniak and the Berkeley folks merged with trillions of VC spewing finance bros, a weird amalgam was created where while everything is in reality about money, it needs to be sugar coated with drivel about wanting to change the world and solve world hunger via the application of middle out compression algorithms
As someone who has used Arc for just over a year now, I have a love/hate relationship with it.
There are some features like the ability to "peek" into a webpage or Little Arc which is really handy for SSO popups without changing full focus to the browser that makes other browsers feel like a step down.
That said, and maybe this will change post-1.0, there were a lot of basic bugs that popped up over time like tabs disappearing from the sidebar, tabs "syncing" into the void because the browser blindly copied state from another browser, tabs that can't be closed and so on.
Generally these are fixed and don't happen all at once but when they do, it rubs up against the new features being touted to make you feel insane. "Boosts are great but I just want the browser to stop interfering so I can do some work"
Anyway, it's a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes. I love it and anything else is a downgrade but it also keeps hurting me but nowhere near enough to outweigh the benefits.
As far as support goes, it feels bit like they're a victim of success. Almost every ticket used to get a response but now I rarely hear anything which makes the canned "We value your feedback" feel hollow. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Support has changed. It's just a somewhat unavoidable outcome when you start as part of a niche and the userbase rapidly grows, making replying to everything untenable.
In all, I'm glad there is a new entrant. Would a new engine be nice? Sure but differentiating a browser and building a full rendering engine at the same time is a bit of a tall order off the bat.
Perhaps if they had a cash generating machine already like Google did. It'll be interesting to see if that changes in future (I assume it won't be who knows) and they're doing a lot of interesting work porting Swift to Windows (their strategy for porting Arc)
I'm still a daily user since things have been solid for the last little while but I do wonder how things might degrade (enshittify) given a future need to return VC investment. You can learn a bit about their monetisation thinking here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eVda3zFLlhc
Particularly the videofile series which talks a lot about their internal workings, metrics and so on. There are times that I've had bad bugs or a new feature was ill received and then the next videofile confirms they've seen that reaction in bulk too
Off topic, but clicking that link and seeing the "X" logo is really jarring to me. I heard it happened, but actually clicking a link in the wild and seeing that big dumb as-is Special Alphabets 4 "X" as a "logo" still shocked me.
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 space.
- it’s vertical tab support is good, and beautiful. Firefox also has vertical tabs via Sidebery and TreeStyleTab, but it’s pretty awful. It hacks on side panels to implement something looking like tabs, but the look and feel honestly sucks
- theming is very easy and beautiful. Also it works by « space »
- lots features dedicated to avoiding tab cluttering:
1. Tabs can auto close when inactive
2. Links that should open a new tab don’t open a new tab by default, they open a pop-in that I can expand to a dedicated tab if I want
3. Links outside of Arc (in a mail client, in a terminal…) don’t open a new tab, they open in a unique Arc window (Little Arc), and I can expand them in a dedicated tab if I want
4. Spaces and profiles allow to organize the tabs properly
- it also integrates with a few websites, for example it can display infos directly on some non-open tabs. On my GitHub tabs, it shows the number of PRs awaiting my review. If I hover on my Google Agenda tab, it display a small agenda for the day without opening a tab
I’m sure I forget a few things that I like. None of these features individually would make me switch to Arc, but seeing all of it at once made me try it, and I don’t regret it.
Also their release notes are fun to read.