- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Oh my god this comment section is annoying…
Yes, we get it! It’s a Chromium fork!
Chrome bad, Firefox good, we know.
And there are plenty of reasons as to why it’s a bad thing but come on, probably more than half of the comments is just this. There’s a lot more to it.
I don’t use Arc, because the whole company gives me “bullshit vibes”. The whole startup thing with big ideas and bright colors… and no concrete monetisation plan… I don’t know. I’ve seen too much of that and I can’t trust it. That and the whole “wanting to integrate AI@ just raises the “startup bullshit” meter even more for me.
However. I’m keeping an eye on it, and I did got to try it during its invite phase and, it sure is something else. This is not just another Chromium fork. It does indeed have big ideas about UI and UX design and challenges the way we do things when browsing the web. It’s trying to be something new and innovative. I respect that.
Web browsers have been feeling the same for years and years. To the average user, there’s no fundamental difference between Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, or Safari, other than: “They look slightly different ” and “This one looks like a crypto bullshit scam”. They will instantly notice the difference with Arc. It looks actually different and it feels different, because it is.
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.
Sandboxing/containerizing stored session data like that is really nice. Firefox Multi-Account Containers is an extension maintained by Mozzila and was really the reason I stuck with Firefox even when it really kinda sucked there for a while.
The issue is that Firefox is, as far as I know, much much more difficult to simply use as just the “rendering engine” for some other customized browser.
There’s the arcfox experiment thing that tries to make firefox look and feel the same as arc, but if arc isn’t mature, then this thing is just simply unusable to almost everyone. It’s still probably easier to do than to make a completely new browser using firefox as a base though.
Firefox already has containers. I still have yet to see a browser that beats stock Firefox in functionality, customization and privacy
I’d venture out there and say Vivaldi in functionality and customisation.
Privacy probably not, though Vivaldi does quite well.
Sadly it’s a Chromium browser.
Edit: a simple comparison.
This is the key. There are a few projects that can beat it in one way or another, but not all 3. Every project that beats FF in a functional way ends up sacrificing privacy. And those that somehow beat it in privacy are underdeveloped and run into weird compatibility issues or are missing support for key plugins.
It’s not like Firefox doesn’t collect user data at all. Vivaldi is hard to seriously fault in that area.
Unfortunately, Firefox lacks some features that make it a little clumsy at times. But for general use it is great. I keep it installed and use it almost every day because I believe in the browser engine and the need for diversity in that area. It’s just not for every need. At least not for me. That’s where Vivaldi and Edge have to help.
According to this Vivaldi protects you from tracking about the same as Chrome and Opera, and both of those provide less tracking protection than even Edge.
PrivacyTests makes it look like Brave is the only browser you should be using simply based on how good it is at blocking trackers by default. Brave is good, but it has it’s fair share of flaws from UI and terrible syncing to built in crypto and NFT stuff.
Chrome is run by a massive corporation with a reputation for for invasions of privacy. Opera is run by a nation state with a reputation for invasions of privacy.
Vivaldi is far better than either of those.
I’m talking about first and third party websites tracking you. I don’t use Chrome or Opera, but I’d rather only have to trust a browser of my choice, than having to place my trust in thousands of different websites.
The point is, if you care about tracking and privacy, you shouldn’t be using Vivaldi in the first place.
That’s what I’m using now. I think Arc does a better job of organizing containers and tabs, but it’s not worth the privacy/advertisement issues that come along with Chromium.
On mobile I’d suggest Fennec instead of stock Firefox since you can use add-ons without limitation, and don’t need workarounds such as the Firefox nightly.
It’s basically stock with enabled add-ons, and following the official release cycle with 2-3 days delay. Maintained by the original developers of the F-Droid store, so also a highly trustworthy source IMHO.
Thanks for the heads up. I run FF on all my mobile devices so it will be nice to have access to all the addons.
The company is also thinking about how to integrate AI into the browser.
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
If you’re going to use a chromium browser, use degoogled chromium. Much better.
From the article:
“The company is also thinking about how to integrate AI into the browser.”
LOL - how absurd. I can’t even tell if this is a real product or just a meme?
It seems like every app is trying to force integration of a version of ChatGPT. It would make way more sense if the OS just had their “assistant” use AI, and just let it recognize the app your using and help out if needed. No need for an AI integration with every app.
While you’re not wrong, the implementation there is very complicated. My solution, which works quite excellently, is if I want to use GPT, I go use GPT
I agree with you. I personally don’t want ChatGPT on my OS either. I just also don’t want it on all of my apps too.
AI AI AI Generative AI
Have you heard about AI yet??
I’m not surprised. Edge has it integrated already and it’s annoying.
I hate it already! ~Strawberry
Isn’t arc a chromium fork thus subject to Google’s shenanigans?
No, it’s not a fork. A fork is when you take the Chromium browser and change it.
This uses the same rendering engine as Chromium - but the browser itself was built from scratch, uses a completely different architecture, and on other operating systems it doesn’t use Chromium at all.
As for “forced to create an account” Arc is temporarily free. Longer term you’ll have to pay a subscription to use it. So it makes sense that you need to sign up.
Yup, anti freedom, and also closed source so extremely privacy invasive as well.
Yes
And you’re forced to create an account to use it. At least it did a few months back
what about privacy?
From what I gather, while they track feature usage, they claim they won’t track your sites. They still won’t help protect your privacy from other apps, companies, and pages.
And… there is a waiting list.
Except for the millions of Windows users…
and Linux users
Or Linux users
“available for anyone to download”
. . .
“It’s still Mac and iOS only”
ಠ_ಠ
I just downloaded to confirm if it still requires signing up for an account to use it (I was on the wait list and ditched it immediately because of this). It still does. I’m ditching it immediately.
I may be a browser whore, always trying anything new, but fuck that. Make it optional for sync and such but lemme use it without signing into your service to see if I want to do so first.
If you feel the same, you aren’t missing much.
I would consider downloading it if only for testing since I work in SaaS, but a browser, Apple only, subscription based?
That’s an edge case I don’t need to consider.
“Unsupported Browser” is the only effort I need to put into it.
Haha, Edge case.
You can download the Mac binary on Linux or Windows
You can’t do anything with it but it’s technically correct… the best type of correct.
So that you will click on the article even though you are not using Mac and iOS.
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.
they have said they have internal builds that run on other rendering engines
so, are there chances that in future there can be builds based on gecko?
Nice explanation. I haven’t used it enough to judge yet myself. So far I find myself frustrated with the merging of tabs and bookmarks. Perhaps I’ll get used to it but it makes no sense to me yet. I see no viable substitute for traditional browser bookmarks (at least not the way I use them). 95% of my bookmarks are pages I do not visit every week or even every month. Where are they supposed to go where they’re both accessible and out of the way? Folders don’t seem like a solution to me.
Edit: another day in and I get it now. I realize now that opening folders in the pinned tabs section is madness, but there is a viable alternative: hover over the folder, then scroll/search for the bookmark you want and click it. That “tab” will now appear under the folder under pins, but the folder otherwise remains closed. So my tabs list does not get cluttered with inactive bookmarked pages, only the ones I have specifically opened, and only until I close them.
This isn’t a huge departure from “traditional” bookmarks systems.
So far I find that Lemmy specifically is much better in Arc, because link to external sites open in popup tabs. All this time I’ve been spawning whole new tabs using keyboard/mouse combos like an animal. The future is now!
When you put it that way, it does actually sound interesting, though I’m still a bit skeptical of its lack of open sourcing. In addition, unmodified Chromium phones home to Google a lot IIRC. There’s a reason Ungoogled Chromium exists. If there’s a way to use Ungoogled Chromium with it or even Gecko, it’d be a bit more compelling for me. I’m not quite sure if I see Chromium’s extension library as a positive. I get that it’s larger than Firefox’s library, and I’m sure there are plenty of interesting ones that aren’t on Firefox but are on Chromium. However, a lot of those extensions are either pretty low quality or are straight-up malware (I’m more concerned with the latter, the former can just be disregarded). It seems like every couple of months or so, a new article comes out about a bunch of malware being found on the Chrome Web Store. Even accounting for Firefox’s smaller userbase, there are very few articles about such incidents happening on Mozilla’s extension repository. And I’ve noticed that Mozilla tends to respond more quickly to reports of malware than Google does. CWS has also had a problem with survey scam extensions that blatantly impersonated various companies in the past, though I’m not sure if that’s still a problem. I’ve recently found that FVD Speed Dial intercepts search queries that are supposed to go to Bing or Yahoo when you use the search bar added by their new tab page before redirecting you to Bing or Yahoo when it’s not supposed to do that. Essentially an MITM attack. This behavior has gotten them banned from Mozilla’s extension repository in the past, but despite the fact that they’re still doing it, Google has featured the extension on CWS. ~Strawberry
Who would want to use closed source browser in 2023?
Even if not caring about freedom, just from security and privacy standpoint.
That’s why they target Apple users. They don’t understand what closed source means, nor care. They just want flashy new thing.
Safari is open source. Also: opensource.apple.com
I have zero interest in a chrom* fork.
That’s not safari
WebKit, rendering engine for Safari, is open source. As it has to be because it was copylefted KHTML.
But the rest of the browser is not, Safari is closed source. Worth noting is that even if it was, you wouldn’t be able to run version adapted for yourself because you every code executed on Apple devices needs their approval.
Safari is a very thin set of changes to WebKit, you can just run & build WebKit nightlies, which I do for web dev, so I don’t screw up my main browser. You have zero idea what you’re talking about, you just read a wiki page.
Macs let you run anything you want, obviously. iOS does, too, as long as you’re a developer sideloading. People who can’t hit compile shouldn’t be allowed to run random shit on their phones which are 2FA etc. keys.
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you need pay a subscription every year to publish your app on the app store. You can sign your app and install it but it’s temporary and you need to repeat it every time it expires afaik.
But you need a mac for it. Don’tyou just love Apple’s fancy walled gardens?
No, you can just download Xcode free from the Mac App Store, or off developer.apple.com. Only the App Store needs the fee.
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Safari is a very thin set of changes to WebKit, you can just run & build WebKit nightlies,
you don’t seem to understand software licenses, so please stop overselling yourself. Just because a software uses open source code, it doesn’t automatically become open-source. You’re first claim was Safari is open-source. It’s not
and compiling a browser for webdev. lol
You clearly didn’t spend any effort trying it, learning how it works, or reading the license. It is literally a browser, just not named Safari and using your saved preferences, which is a good thing when you’re developing. Not that you can.
I award you zero points.
Closed source, which automatically makes a web browser dogshit and completely useless.
ACAB
All Chromes Are Bastards
