this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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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:
Yes - it is closed source... but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that's good enough.
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!
so, are there chances that in future there can be builds based on gecko?
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