Thought I’d throw my opinion into the ring here, since literally every comment is shitting on this.
Arc is a design project, that also happens to be a web browser. If you’re just calling this “another chromium fork”, I think you’re completely missing the point of who this product is for. First of all, it’s not for you.
Secondly, the design changes that arc is working on perfecting are pretty groundbreaking. The ability to customize the css and functionality of any web page without code and it saves your profiles for future use with a marketplace is super interesting to me. So much UI on modern websites is entirely unnecessary. As a designer, this is a dream.
Also, nobody is mentioning that their working on a Windows version THAT NATIVELY RUNS SWIFT ON WINDOWS. This is a big deal for future cross compatibility in general, why are so many people not looking at this?
Anyway that’s my rant. Trying to voice my opinions even if they’re the odd ones out to prevent a Lemmy based echo chamber. Feel free to disagree.
It’s chromium, it does that ambient color changing shit I hate, it “anticipates my needs” instead of just waiting my my instruction. This is a browser designed to make me angry.
I tried it for a bit, even daily drove it on my laptop for a while. It has a pretty slick interface, and uses containers so you could, for example, have one container that you are logged into your google account for (say, Youtube), and the rest of your containers you can not log into Google.
The downside is that 1) It’s still not mature as of a month ago. They are making massive changes and adding new features constantly, and 2) It’s still Chromium, so all of the downsides of that are still present.
If they switch to using Firefox or another open-source foundation, I’d be all over it.
Firefox already has containers. I still have yet to see a browser that beats stock Firefox in functionality, customization and privacy
If this browser is as slow as their website, I can’t say it’s looking too good. It also appears to be just another Chromium browser, because I guess we needed more of those. And it appears to be closed source. Hard pass. ~Strawberry
Edit: No plans for a Linux port and they’re planning on shoehorning A"I" into it. I hate it already.
It uses whatever rending engine works best on the platform you’re using - Chromium’s main advantage is the extensive plugin library so that’s the one they use on most platforms, though they have said they have internal builds that run on other rending engines and those work fine (except for plugins). If there’s every any reason to drop Chromium they will.
As for being “just another” anything - it really isn’t. The way tabs work is fundamentally different to any other browser. At a glance, it just looks like a basic browser with tabs in the sidebar instead of across the top but it’s so much more than that.
For example most browser have three types of tab - Regular, Pinned, and Incognito. Arc has “Today” tabs, Pinned Tabs, Favourite Tabs (these are closer to “Pinned” tabs in other browsers), “Little” tabs, Split tabs, Popup Tabs, and Incognito tabs.
Notice there is no “regular” on that list - none of the tabs in Arc behave like a regular browser tab. Arc also doesn’t have bookmarks - tabs replace bookmarks. Here’s the breakdown:
- Today tabs go away at the end of the day (you can change this to be longer, I don’t recommend doing that). They go into an Archive and can easily be recovered.
- Pinned tabs aren’t like pinned tabs are synced between all your devices/browser windows and they stick around until you get rid of them. The process to create and remove a pinned tab is really simple and they are organised in groups and folders. Pinned tabs won’t necessarily bne running in RAM, so in a way they’re almost like a bookmark.
- Favorite tabs appear as just an icon instead of a full tab, and they appear in all of your groups (within a profile). They are also pre-loaded — handy for web apps that take a while to load.
- A Little tab tab doesn’t have tabs - it harkens back to the old days when the web was a lot simpler. It’s useful for quickly looking something up and then closing it a few seconds later. Links from other apps open in this mode by default.
- Split tabs are a single tab that contains multiple webpages - e.g. you might have your zoom meeting and your notes as a single tab.
- Popup tabs are similar to “little” tabs, except instead of being in a separate window they are embedded in a tab. If you have, for example, your issue tracker as a pinned tab, and you load up a link to a different domain name, it will open in one of these. You can go back to your issue tracker by closing the popup tab instead of hitting the back button six times… but it will still be a single tab for both your issue tracker and the link that the issue tracker took you to.
- Incognito works the same as any other browser.
Yes - it is closed source… but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that’s good enough.
