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Arc Browser Company: Chrome and Safari face a new challenger

91 points by cpeterso 4y ago

gabereiser 4y ago
“It will be free upfront; the team is looking at developing premium subscription features for enterprise users, perhaps somewhere around $12 a month, echoing the freemium model of Slack Technologies Inc., Dropbox Inc., and other productivity services.” Good luck with that. The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it. If it’s open source then it will be ridiculed for not having an open license. If there’s an open license then it’s no longer yours to control and monetize. Chrome gets away with this because of chromium is the core, Chrome is the added “management” of your browser “experience”. Safari gets away with this because WebKit is core, Safari is the added “management”. Both are free from a monetary cost perspective on the user. Both position themselves as the keeper of secrets for their platform. I’m all for an open/free/libre browser that isn’t WebKit. I believe it’s naive to think you can change the existing web experience with a browser alone.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it Keep in mind that the last time this was tried, free/open-source alternatives were on-par if not better and the web was much less hostile. Nowadays, not only is the web teeming with hostility that can best be addressed by a browser, but the closest free/open-source solution (Firefox) is half-baked and doesn't actually solve many of these issues nor is it incentivized to due to murky funding (most of it comes from Google, a big advertising provider) and a dysfunctional company. A browser whose funding comes directly from its users wouldn't have these misaligned incentives and wouldn't be afraid of doing bold moves that piss off adtech. The Enterprise™ spends a lot of money on (often dubious) security products and given that the browser is often on the front-line for various threats, a browser with built-in security features (both against malware and other features such as DLP, blocking/filtering/monitoring without middleboxes) with a paid enterprise plan subsidizing a free version for personal use could become a sustainable business.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    how is Firefox half-baked? i'm using it every day along with Safari and don't see any significant differences
    - sosull 4y ago
      +1, it’s a great piece of software.
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      With something as wide scoped as a browser this inevitably comes down to "well the 200 things I think are relevant do/don't work the same in favor of a/b" out of tens of thousands, if not more, of things implemented. For me Firefox is about as good as any. Upsides here, downsides there, and nothing truly outstanding overall. It seems severely far behind in modern color (e.g. HDR videos or all of the wide gamut CSS specifications coming out), ahead in terms of single profile compartmentalization (containers), but behind in profile management (the profile manager sucks if you even know how to get to it). For as much as it champions being the last bastion of the free web it comes default with a decent amount of crapware (pocket, vpn) and has lost its way in terms of power user flexibility (UI customization, mobile extension limits, removal of power user flags). That said it's still better than the alternatives in those spaces, just not as good as it used to be. For another none of these might matter but a lot of other reasons I don't even think about might. In the end even Firefox's own usage statistic point to the vast majority seeming to agree it doesn't have anything compelling enough to be worth switching to/evangelizing for anymore though.
      - shkkmo 4y ago
        Firefox on desktop is pertty solid, despite some controversial decisions. Firedox on android has a lot of issues.
        iamcurious 4y ago
        Which ones? On principle, I never use chrome on android. Am I missing some killer feature?
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I’m all for an open/free/libre browser that isn’t WebKit. I believe it’s naive to think you can change the existing web experience with a browser alone. (Probably today you mean Blink?) This browser, like most "new" and "shiny" browsers today are just using embedded chrome and then put their own UX on top, calling it a new browser. Before, we'd call it a "browser shell" or something like that, but seemingly companies like this can launch with misleading wording and no one seems to notice it.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  > Safari gets away with this because... No, Safari gets away with it on iOS because Apple literally allows no other option. On desktop, Safari doesn't "get away" with anything, because people have choice.
nwienert 4y ago
It's hard to read articles with this unabashed of a tone, feels like much of the company's own claims are uncritically re-printed.
- stevenhuang 4y ago
  Their characterisation of power users' bad tab management is certainly contrived, but it's cool to see their take on a new browser ui. Their proposed UI would be familiar to many FF vertical tab/tree tab users.
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  A lot of news media is lightly edited press releases. PR pros outnumber journalists 6-1 [1] and they do a lot of the work for journalists upfront that make it easier for them to publish. [1] https://www.prdaily.com/report-pr-pros-outnumber-journalists-by-a-6-to-1-ratio/ https://www.prdaily.com/report-pr-pros-outnumber-journalists...
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  You’d be amazed how many such articles and reviews are ads in disguise. …Sometimes though, you might not have enough dough for the disguise.
- deleted 4y ago
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- omosubi 4y ago
  As they say, if no one in the article is mad that it's printed, it's PR, not news
  - inlined 4y ago
    Google might be mad given the accusations that Chrome features are killed if they lower Google searches.
john-titor 4y ago
firefox <3
- deleted 4y ago
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geogra4 4y ago
Is there any reason that they couldn't build this ui on top of chrome? I've seen quite a lot of chrome based browsers with interesting uis
- ushakov 4y ago
  a ui on top of chrome doesn't get you $25 million in funding and a dedicated Bloomberg article edit: apparently it does
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    I'd expect the opposite. It's likely not worth funding someone to reimplement a whole browser engine instead of reusing an existing one. It would take a lot of time and money to build and maintain and you don't gain too much by having your own entirely custom engine.
    - fabrice_d 4y ago
      There's a difference between forking a full browser (this is quite easy initially, but down the road your fork may end up being difficult to maintain) and building a new browser on top of the rendering engine (Blink here, could be Gecko or Webkit). In the latter case, the initial investment is higher, so getting to a daily driver product requires more effort. However long term that can be beneficial because you don't conflict that much with upstream changes. Writing a new rendering engine and browser on top is totally different effort as you may guess.
- 225beef 4y ago
  Im a beta tester for this product and it does use Chromium under the hood, pre-bundled with uBlock no less.
  - geogra4 4y ago
    Well then it doesn't seem so groundbreaking then
ushakov 4y ago
https://archive.ph/4MuhM https://archive.ph/4MuhM
- aaronfc 4y ago
fny 4y ago
- ushakov 4y ago
  this one is arguably not as bad as YC's "Stablegains" investment
- deleted 4y ago
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ushakov 4y ago
> Hovering the mouse over a Google Calendar button will surface a tiny panel of upcoming appointments. Spotify comes with an embedded player to shuffle through songs how long until this feature breaks, because they rely on third-party APIs like Google's that change all the time?
- ushakov 4y ago
  also why does a music player and calendar widget needs to be in a browser? it's already implemented in system-level ui (at least on macOS and Gnome)
- deleted 4y ago
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IceDane 4y ago
Wow, is this a serious article? I honestly felt like I was reading the onion for a bit. This is just yet another tech bro trying to "reinvent" the browser by giving certain web applications a more first class experience and shuffling around(and hiding) UI elements. Opera has been doing a lot of neat stuff in this space for years, and we all know how well it's going for them and their market share. It will never cease to baffle me how easily some people manage to get other people to throw money at them. I'm sure you can sell some $12 subscription to a macOS hipster productivity addict who is already subbing to 15 other shiny-looking macOS-only apps, but otherwise I hope your investors are ready for you to capture a whopping 1-2% of the browser market share like opera.
- deleted 4y ago
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behnamoh 4y ago
so just bloatware bells and whistles
- ratww 4y ago
  From the description, it actually reminds me of Internet Explorer toolbars in terms of functionality, which were quite common bloatware. I don't disagree that there's new interesting features that can go into browsers (like Safari's OCR), but a browsers are kind of an important type of software, we gotta be a bit more careful with bloat.
- deleted 4y ago
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brimstedt 4y ago
In my opinion, they don't seem to solve the browser tab problem, just iterate on it. Just remove them completely and let you window manager manage your windows. (And yes, Firefox still supports browsing without tabs, so we got what we need right there ;)
- mmphosis 4y ago
  Firefox still supports browsing without tabs It sort of does. I can't open settings in a new window without opening settings in a new tab first and then moving the tab to a new window. Or, create a new window and paste about:preferences into the url bar. Maybe there's some userChrome.css to do it. I can create userChrome.css, which is discouraged, in order to hide the redundant tab bar with the single tab in it. Yes, it sort of works, it's kludgy and has issues.
rascul 4y ago
Is this just another Chrome skin or is it actually a new browser?
- coffeefirst 4y ago
  It's Chromium, but more of a "rework the UI from scratch" than just a skin. I have the beta. It has some interesting ideas.
  - debdut 4y ago
    can i get an invite?
    - layer8 4y ago
      Go here: https://browserco.typeform.com/to/l9lYbJtU https://browserco.typeform.com/to/l9lYbJtU
agluszak 4y ago
> wide address bars wasting valuable space across the top of the screen to display what he calls “URL gibberish.” That's not "gibberish", in my opinion understanding what URLs mean (or even reading them at all!) is one of the most overlooked computer skills nowadays. If they look like gibberish that's because of: 1. Tracking parameters spam (?fbclid=qwerty) 2. Lack of knowledge that many parts of the URL can (and even should) be skipped when sharing it. So many times my non-programmer friends were astonished that you don't have to paste that ugly part! Hiding the details instead of explaining them is a way leading to disaster! Many banking scams rely on users not paying attention to URLs. I think that a better "innovation" would be to have the browser clean URLs from tracking bits without extensions.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  There has to be some solution to the phishing problem that doesn't require teaching the general population how to parse URLs. there's room to innovate here.
- ushakov 4y ago
  the issue is they have to sell this to the investors what do they answer when investors ask a typical: "What makes you different from competition?" their answer is: "We don't waste valuable space across the top of the screen to display URL gibberish" the article is for business people, who could potentially invest into their Series A round, not for us tech people
- deleted 4y ago
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- gman83 4y ago
  At the same time, I think that more than 90% of people that I know have absolutely no idea how to read a URL, and are not going to learn. I think that just showing the domain for them wouldn't be so bad. I don't think I'm the target audience for this browser.
echan00 4y ago
How is this unknown company a challenger? How is this even worthy of Bloomberg to report on
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Paid for advertising maybe?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- capableweb 4y ago
  A lot of stuff you see in Bloomberg (and elsewhere) either gets paid to be put there (some via agencies that specializes in things like that), or put on there via connections. They are not reporting on underdogs for the fun of it.
  - sealeck 4y ago
    Do you have a source for this? Not in any way saying it's not true but would be interesting if there was some analysis somewhere.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Unfortunately no, only personal experience working in bunch of different companies (some US based, some EU) where they've employed agencies like that and gotten the result they wanted (an article published).
    - gabrielsroka 4y ago
      http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- Terretta 4y ago
  See "earned media": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_media https://sproutsocial.com/insights/earned-media-strategy/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/earned-media-strategy/
nskvortsov 4y ago
Browser tab problem is not about the web or the browser, it is about users' habits and discipline. If you suffer from this "problem" invest time in learning shortcuts for bookmark, typing to search history in the address bar, saving things in proper place for later reading and, above all, concentrate on one thing for more than 5 minutes.
- pvg 4y ago
  At the end of the day, it's a browser, not a boot camp. If user re-education worked designing software (and most other things) would be a lot easier.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Karunamon 4y ago
  This mindset/rant does not work in the real world. When a large enterprise company tried it, (Apple), they were widely mocked for blaming users for “holding it wrong”. It is not up to developers to determine how users use their tools. The best you can do is hint and nudge, but it is not your decision at the end of the day.
  - layer8 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s solvable if users don’t themselves close or group/categorize the stuff they’re opening. Any automation/heuristic is prone to not do what the user wants, because the tool can’t really judge why the user opened any given page, and thus can’t make an informed decision in how to handle it. I can think of new (mostly power-)user features to support the user in organizing opened pages, but I have a hard time imagining an I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-this user feature that would universally “just work”. (Of course, I may be wrong.) The closest I can think of is to have sortable list views of open pages that you can sort by open date, last updated, possibly content type (e.g. has video), and/or group by site or by “opened from” (navigation history graph). Again, this is moving into power user territory.
cutler 4y ago
What kind of dev tools and extensions will Arc offer? If it's just a consumer browser it's doomed to fail.
kbyatnal 4y ago
why are all these comments so negative? I, for one, am very excited that talented developers and designers are reimagining such a core part of everyone's daily workflow. The embedded calendar / music player (along with auto archived tabs) is very cool - not sure how well it'll work in practice, but it's clear the team has put their heart into this. And more competition for Google/Apple is always good.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ushakov 4y ago
  beyond a slightly different UI, there's nothing you can "reimagine" in a web browser embedding third-party services is a feature that is prone to break often Chrome became the #1 because it was technically advanced (faster) but more importantly - endorsed by a search giant
  - zagrebian 4y ago
    The UI shown in the screenshot is radically different.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      i see bookmarks, tabs, navigation and the browser window nothing in the interface looks “radically different” to me
      - zagrebian 4y ago
        Those are not tabs but website icons (think iOS home screen).
- deleted 4y ago
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machinerychorus 4y ago
Darn, I was hoping this would be about https://arc.io https://arc.io. I know it's not very popular on hn because "how dare they use my bandwidth and cpu" but I think it's really cool. A viable business model for websites that doesn't require cramming things full of ads.
- ehhthing 4y ago
  Thank you for introducing me to a wonderful privacy nightmare. P2P networks inherently are not private: everyone on the network knows who else is on the network and what they are doing. Thus one bad node could collect data on others' browsing habits and track people quite easily.
theyak 4y ago
So it's Microsoft Edge? https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-vertical-tabs-in-microsoft-edge/ https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...
- netsharc 4y ago
  Vertical tabs was in Opera when it was good, it was probably there a decade ago. Its spiritual successor Vivaldi also has this.
ushakov 4y ago
> Even Miller realizes his ambitions sound absurd > he jokes about his company’s 0% market share investors: give this man $25m
rejectfinite 4y ago
>A Startup Wants to Rescue You From Browser Tab Hell Vivaldi, Edge and Firefox already do this with vertical tabs. Vivaldi also has the excellent tab search.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Thank god for TreeStyleTabs, couldn't live without it (and main reason I'm not switching away from Firefox). But it doesn't really save you from "browser tab hell", it just makes it easier to manage. If anything, I have more tabs open now, across multiple reboots just because it's so much easier to find tabs that I might as well have all of them open. Here is how it looks right now for me: https://imgur.com/a/EHr8JEe https://imgur.com/a/EHr8JEe And that's the list scrolled all the way to the bottom. Easily three-four pages more if you scroll upwards.
  - ajvs 4y ago
    I honestly don't know how people manage any serious web browsing without Tree Style Tabs. It's hell on Chromium-based browsers with their constantly shrinking tab width, and the workarounds aren't much better.
- sam345 4y ago
  Checkout Fast Tab Switcher in firefox. Far preferable to vertical tabs. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-tab-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-tab-swit...
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    You can also search your open tabs in Firefox's address bar by first typing % in the address bar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...
DarthNebo 4y ago
Anyone remember Refresh concept from a while back, https://phase.com/magazine/refresh-rethinking-the-browser/ https://phase.com/magazine/refresh-rethinking-the-browser/
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  This looks great, did it ever launch?
  - workona 4y ago
    Our iPad app provides a pretty similar user experience as their concept video: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workona-project-organizer/id1514249129 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workona-project-organizer/id15...
Shadonototra 4y ago
dead on arrival, nobody is looking for a new browser chrome proved that people give no shit about browsers the UI/UX haven't changed since day 1, still minimalist AF firefox usage dropped massively, as they kept iterating on their UI/UX, forgetting the reason why people needed a browser in the fist place, instead they kept raising the salary of their CEO, as if he/she/it was the reason why people wanted to use firefox :') the focus is on the websites people literally only want an address bar and sync-able bookmarks/history with their phone, that's exactly what chrome/safari provide firefox can't even provide this, and they keep push their AD/sponsored articles about how sweet firefox is, nobody cares every other browsers from shady companies like this one are just cash grab (including firefox) the only logical evolution of browsers is literally ChromeOS, you boot to browse people's places (websites)
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > people give no shit about browsers This is mainly because people who are tech-savvy already have a good set up (Firefox with uBlock Origin and all bullshit disabled), and those who aren't don't know what they're missing out on because a browser by itself (even Firefox) doesn't actually fix any of their problems. A user-focused browser bundled with functionality that fixes today's user-hostile web (whether built-in or as preinstalled uBlock/etc) would convince anyone who tries it.
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
ThinkBeat 4y ago
"Arc Browser" is just Chromium + uBlock + some GUI enhancements I really wish that articles about "new browsers" should state up front what (if anything) they are built on top of. Each time I am hopeful that someone has taken on the monumental task of creating a new, better, or at least different web engine/ browser. The competition would be good. The near impossible complexity in writing a new web browser from scratch seems indicative as to how broken the system has gotten.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I agree. Yet Another Chromium Clone is not all that interesting, regardless of how its UI is dressed up, because realistically the browser's most core qualities are not going to differ significantly from those of any other Chrome-based browser. Being forthcoming about the engine of choice will help people set reasonable expectations… it's not a revolution, it's Chrome with a new coat of paint.
- zagrebian 4y ago
  > Each time I am hopeful that someone has taken on the monumental task of creating a new, better, or at least different web engine/ browser. The competition would be good. What would be the benefit of having a browser with a new web engine?
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    Competition and funding for non chromium initiatives. If someoone had asked the same question before chrome would you have agreed with them?
    - zagrebian 4y ago
      Well, Google didn’t develop a new engine for Chrome. They forked WebKit. And then Samsung, Microsoft, and others forked Chromium for their own browsers. (These forks are kept close to Chromium, but they’re still forks.)
  - CharlesW 4y ago
zagrebian 4y ago
They need to come up with a different name. ARC Browser https://www.arcbrowser.com https://www.arcbrowser.com is already taken.
- deleted 4y ago
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joeman1000 4y ago
Tab-groups has fixed this clutter for me. I can: + hoard tabs in these groups (on safari), + close my browser session, + go and do something else with my life for a while, + come back (even on a different device) and open safari, select that saved tab group + the old ‘session’ is loaded and all my old tabs are back. There’s no longer any need to keep a 100-tab browser session open any more. Sometimes the syncing is horrible with this feature across devices though. I find myself opening a new tab and the sync process immediately deleting it… more often than I’d like.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
I thought this was going to be about the Flow browser. I'm interested in Ekioh Flow as a faster browser engine. Unfortunately it seems to be shaping up to be not only closed-source, but only available to proprietary licensees rather than as a downloadable product to run on desktops.
time4tea 4y ago
Lmgtfy - oh no you can't! Unless you meant a ROM manager.
hexage1814 4y ago
I will tell you what: I like they are trying something new. I'm not sure if it is gonna work, but if we stop to think, the last invention on web browsing user interface was the tabs, and maybe tab grouping more recently, but like they were invented in the 90s, so it's nice to see some someone trying something new, some new approach.
pHollda 4y ago
Why aren't they doing this on mobile?
notananthem 4y ago
Closed source, pass
hexage1814 4y ago
For those interested, here is a preview: https://www.loom.com/share/e540f28366ff4703a7c882291875166f https://www.loom.com/share/e540f28366ff4703a7c882291875166f

91 points by cpeterso 4y ago

“It will be free upfront; the team is looking at developing premium subscription features for enterprise users, perhaps somewhere around $12 a month, echoing the freemium model of Slack Technologies Inc., Dropbox Inc., and other productivity services.” Good luck with that. The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it. If it’s open source then it will be ridiculed for not having an open license. If there’s an open license then it’s no longer yours to control and monetize. Chrome gets away with this because of chromium is the core, Chrome is the added “management” of your browser “experience”. Safari gets away with this because WebKit is core, Safari is the added “management”. Both are free from a monetary cost perspective on the user. Both position themselves as the keeper of secrets for their platform. I’m all for an open/free/libre browser that isn’t WebKit. I believe it’s naive to think you can change the existing web experience with a browser alone.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> The majority of browsers that were commercially closed software didn’t make it Keep in mind that the last time this was tried, free/open-source alternatives were on-par if not better and the web was much less hostile. Nowadays, not only is the web teeming with hostility that can best be addressed by a browser, but the closest free/open-source solution (Firefox) is half-baked and doesn't actually solve many of these issues nor is it incentivized to due to murky funding (most of it comes from Google, a big advertising provider) and a dysfunctional company. A browser whose funding comes directly from its users wouldn't have these misaligned incentives and wouldn't be afraid of doing bold moves that piss off adtech. The Enterprise™ spends a lot of money on (often dubious) security products and given that the browser is often on the front-line for various threats, a browser with built-in security features (both against malware and other features such as DLP, blocking/filtering/monitoring without middleboxes) with a paid enterprise plan subsidizing a free version for personal use could become a sustainable business.
- ushakov 4y ago
  how is Firefox half-baked? i'm using it every day along with Safari and don't see any significant differences
  - sosull 4y ago
    +1, it’s a great piece of software.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    With something as wide scoped as a browser this inevitably comes down to "well the 200 things I think are relevant do/don't work the same in favor of a/b" out of tens of thousands, if not more, of things implemented. For me Firefox is about as good as any. Upsides here, downsides there, and nothing truly outstanding overall. It seems severely far behind in modern color (e.g. HDR videos or all of the wide gamut CSS specifications coming out), ahead in terms of single profile compartmentalization (containers), but behind in profile management (the profile manager sucks if you even know how to get to it). For as much as it champions being the last bastion of the free web it comes default with a decent amount of crapware (pocket, vpn) and has lost its way in terms of power user flexibility (UI customization, mobile extension limits, removal of power user flags). That said it's still better than the alternatives in those spaces, just not as good as it used to be. For another none of these might matter but a lot of other reasons I don't even think about might. In the end even Firefox's own usage statistic point to the vast majority seeming to agree it doesn't have anything compelling enough to be worth switching to/evangelizing for anymore though.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      Firefox on desktop is pertty solid, despite some controversial decisions. Firedox on android has a lot of issues.
      - iamcurious 4y ago
        Which ones? On principle, I never use chrome on android. Am I missing some killer feature?
capableweb 4y ago
> I’m all for an open/free/libre browser that isn’t WebKit. I believe it’s naive to think you can change the existing web experience with a browser alone. (Probably today you mean Blink?) This browser, like most "new" and "shiny" browsers today are just using embedded chrome and then put their own UX on top, calling it a new browser. Before, we'd call it a "browser shell" or something like that, but seemingly companies like this can launch with misleading wording and no one seems to notice it.
perryizgr8 4y ago
> Safari gets away with this because... No, Safari gets away with it on iOS because Apple literally allows no other option. On desktop, Safari doesn't "get away" with anything, because people have choice.

nwienert 4y ago

It's hard to read articles with this unabashed of a tone, feels like much of the company's own claims are uncritically re-printed.

stevenhuang 4y ago
Their characterisation of power users' bad tab management is certainly contrived, but it's cool to see their take on a new browser ui. Their proposed UI would be familiar to many FF vertical tab/tree tab users.
vegetablepotpie 4y ago
A lot of news media is lightly edited press releases. PR pros outnumber journalists 6-1 [1] and they do a lot of the work for journalists upfront that make it easier for them to publish. [1] https://www.prdaily.com/report-pr-pros-outnumber-journalists-by-a-6-to-1-ratio/ https://www.prdaily.com/report-pr-pros-outnumber-journalists...
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
You’d be amazed how many such articles and reviews are ads in disguise. …Sometimes though, you might not have enough dough for the disguise.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
omosubi 4y ago
As they say, if no one in the article is mad that it's printed, it's PR, not news
- inlined 4y ago
  Google might be mad given the accusations that Chrome features are killed if they lower Google searches.

john-titor 4y ago

firefox <3

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

geogra4 4y ago

Is there any reason that they couldn't build this ui on top of chrome? I've seen quite a lot of chrome based browsers with interesting uis

ushakov 4y ago
a ui on top of chrome doesn't get you $25 million in funding and a dedicated Bloomberg article edit: apparently it does
- charcircuit 4y ago
  I'd expect the opposite. It's likely not worth funding someone to reimplement a whole browser engine instead of reusing an existing one. It would take a lot of time and money to build and maintain and you don't gain too much by having your own entirely custom engine.
  - fabrice_d 4y ago
    There's a difference between forking a full browser (this is quite easy initially, but down the road your fork may end up being difficult to maintain) and building a new browser on top of the rendering engine (Blink here, could be Gecko or Webkit). In the latter case, the initial investment is higher, so getting to a daily driver product requires more effort. However long term that can be beneficial because you don't conflict that much with upstream changes. Writing a new rendering engine and browser on top is totally different effort as you may guess.
225beef 4y ago
Im a beta tester for this product and it does use Chromium under the hood, pre-bundled with uBlock no less.
- geogra4 4y ago
  Well then it doesn't seem so groundbreaking then

ushakov 4y ago

https://archive.ph/4MuhM https://archive.ph/4MuhM

aaronfc 4y ago

fny 4y ago

ushakov 4y ago
this one is arguably not as bad as YC's "Stablegains" investment
deleted 4y ago
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ushakov 4y ago

> Hovering the mouse over a Google Calendar button will surface a tiny panel of upcoming appointments. Spotify comes with an embedded player to shuffle through songs how long until this feature breaks, because they rely on third-party APIs like Google's that change all the time?

ushakov 4y ago
also why does a music player and calendar widget needs to be in a browser? it's already implemented in system-level ui (at least on macOS and Gnome)
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IceDane 4y ago

Wow, is this a serious article? I honestly felt like I was reading the onion for a bit. This is just yet another tech bro trying to "reinvent" the browser by giving certain web applications a more first class experience and shuffling around(and hiding) UI elements. Opera has been doing a lot of neat stuff in this space for years, and we all know how well it's going for them and their market share. It will never cease to baffle me how easily some people manage to get other people to throw money at them. I'm sure you can sell some $12 subscription to a macOS hipster productivity addict who is already subbing to 15 other shiny-looking macOS-only apps, but otherwise I hope your investors are ready for you to capture a whopping 1-2% of the browser market share like opera.

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behnamoh 4y ago

so just bloatware bells and whistles

ratww 4y ago
From the description, it actually reminds me of Internet Explorer toolbars in terms of functionality, which were quite common bloatware. I don't disagree that there's new interesting features that can go into browsers (like Safari's OCR), but a browsers are kind of an important type of software, we gotta be a bit more careful with bloat.
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brimstedt 4y ago

In my opinion, they don't seem to solve the browser tab problem, just iterate on it. Just remove them completely and let you window manager manage your windows. (And yes, Firefox still supports browsing without tabs, so we got what we need right there ;)

mmphosis 4y ago
Firefox still supports browsing without tabs It sort of does. I can't open settings in a new window without opening settings in a new tab first and then moving the tab to a new window. Or, create a new window and paste about:preferences into the url bar. Maybe there's some userChrome.css to do it. I can create userChrome.css, which is discouraged, in order to hide the redundant tab bar with the single tab in it. Yes, it sort of works, it's kludgy and has issues.

rascul 4y ago

Is this just another Chrome skin or is it actually a new browser?

coffeefirst 4y ago
It's Chromium, but more of a "rework the UI from scratch" than just a skin. I have the beta. It has some interesting ideas.
- debdut 4y ago
  can i get an invite?
  - layer8 4y ago
    Go here: https://browserco.typeform.com/to/l9lYbJtU https://browserco.typeform.com/to/l9lYbJtU

agluszak 4y ago

> wide address bars wasting valuable space across the top of the screen to display what he calls “URL gibberish.” That's not "gibberish", in my opinion understanding what URLs mean (or even reading them at all!) is one of the most overlooked computer skills nowadays. If they look like gibberish that's because of: 1. Tracking parameters spam (?fbclid=qwerty) 2. Lack of knowledge that many parts of the URL can (and even should) be skipped when sharing it. So many times my non-programmer friends were astonished that you don't have to paste that ugly part! Hiding the details instead of explaining them is a way leading to disaster! Many banking scams rely on users not paying attention to URLs. I think that a better "innovation" would be to have the browser clean URLs from tracking bits without extensions.

admax88qqq 4y ago
There has to be some solution to the phishing problem that doesn't require teaching the general population how to parse URLs. there's room to innovate here.
ushakov 4y ago
the issue is they have to sell this to the investors what do they answer when investors ask a typical: "What makes you different from competition?" their answer is: "We don't waste valuable space across the top of the screen to display URL gibberish" the article is for business people, who could potentially invest into their Series A round, not for us tech people
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gman83 4y ago
At the same time, I think that more than 90% of people that I know have absolutely no idea how to read a URL, and are not going to learn. I think that just showing the domain for them wouldn't be so bad. I don't think I'm the target audience for this browser.

echan00 4y ago

How is this unknown company a challenger? How is this even worthy of Bloomberg to report on

readthenotes1 4y ago
Paid for advertising maybe?
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capableweb 4y ago
A lot of stuff you see in Bloomberg (and elsewhere) either gets paid to be put there (some via agencies that specializes in things like that), or put on there via connections. They are not reporting on underdogs for the fun of it.
- sealeck 4y ago
  Do you have a source for this? Not in any way saying it's not true but would be interesting if there was some analysis somewhere.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Unfortunately no, only personal experience working in bunch of different companies (some US based, some EU) where they've employed agencies like that and gotten the result they wanted (an article published).
  - gabrielsroka 4y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Terretta 4y ago
See "earned media": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_media https://sproutsocial.com/insights/earned-media-strategy/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/earned-media-strategy/

nskvortsov 4y ago

Browser tab problem is not about the web or the browser, it is about users' habits and discipline. If you suffer from this "problem" invest time in learning shortcuts for bookmark, typing to search history in the address bar, saving things in proper place for later reading and, above all, concentrate on one thing for more than 5 minutes.

pvg 4y ago
At the end of the day, it's a browser, not a boot camp. If user re-education worked designing software (and most other things) would be a lot easier.
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Karunamon 4y ago
This mindset/rant does not work in the real world. When a large enterprise company tried it, (Apple), they were widely mocked for blaming users for “holding it wrong”. It is not up to developers to determine how users use their tools. The best you can do is hint and nudge, but it is not your decision at the end of the day.
- layer8 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s solvable if users don’t themselves close or group/categorize the stuff they’re opening. Any automation/heuristic is prone to not do what the user wants, because the tool can’t really judge why the user opened any given page, and thus can’t make an informed decision in how to handle it. I can think of new (mostly power-)user features to support the user in organizing opened pages, but I have a hard time imagining an I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-this user feature that would universally “just work”. (Of course, I may be wrong.) The closest I can think of is to have sortable list views of open pages that you can sort by open date, last updated, possibly content type (e.g. has video), and/or group by site or by “opened from” (navigation history graph). Again, this is moving into power user territory.

cutler 4y ago

What kind of dev tools and extensions will Arc offer? If it's just a consumer browser it's doomed to fail.

kbyatnal 4y ago

why are all these comments so negative? I, for one, am very excited that talented developers and designers are reimagining such a core part of everyone's daily workflow. The embedded calendar / music player (along with auto archived tabs) is very cool - not sure how well it'll work in practice, but it's clear the team has put their heart into this. And more competition for Google/Apple is always good.

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ushakov 4y ago
beyond a slightly different UI, there's nothing you can "reimagine" in a web browser embedding third-party services is a feature that is prone to break often Chrome became the #1 because it was technically advanced (faster) but more importantly - endorsed by a search giant
- zagrebian 4y ago
  The UI shown in the screenshot is radically different.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    i see bookmarks, tabs, navigation and the browser window nothing in the interface looks “radically different” to me
    - zagrebian 4y ago
      Those are not tabs but website icons (think iOS home screen).
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machinerychorus 4y ago

Darn, I was hoping this would be about https://arc.io https://arc.io. I know it's not very popular on hn because "how dare they use my bandwidth and cpu" but I think it's really cool. A viable business model for websites that doesn't require cramming things full of ads.

ehhthing 4y ago
Thank you for introducing me to a wonderful privacy nightmare. P2P networks inherently are not private: everyone on the network knows who else is on the network and what they are doing. Thus one bad node could collect data on others' browsing habits and track people quite easily.

theyak 4y ago

So it's Microsoft Edge? https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-vertical-tabs-in-microsoft-edge/ https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...

netsharc 4y ago
Vertical tabs was in Opera when it was good, it was probably there a decade ago. Its spiritual successor Vivaldi also has this.

ushakov 4y ago

> Even Miller realizes his ambitions sound absurd > he jokes about his company’s 0% market share investors: give this man $25m

rejectfinite 4y ago

>A Startup Wants to Rescue You From Browser Tab Hell Vivaldi, Edge and Firefox already do this with vertical tabs. Vivaldi also has the excellent tab search.

capableweb 4y ago
Thank god for TreeStyleTabs, couldn't live without it (and main reason I'm not switching away from Firefox). But it doesn't really save you from "browser tab hell", it just makes it easier to manage. If anything, I have more tabs open now, across multiple reboots just because it's so much easier to find tabs that I might as well have all of them open. Here is how it looks right now for me: https://imgur.com/a/EHr8JEe https://imgur.com/a/EHr8JEe And that's the list scrolled all the way to the bottom. Easily three-four pages more if you scroll upwards.
- ajvs 4y ago
  I honestly don't know how people manage any serious web browsing without Tree Style Tabs. It's hell on Chromium-based browsers with their constantly shrinking tab width, and the workarounds aren't much better.
sam345 4y ago
Checkout Fast Tab Switcher in firefox. Far preferable to vertical tabs. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-tab-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fast-tab-swit...
- cpeterso 4y ago
  You can also search your open tabs in Firefox's address bar by first typing % in the address bar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...

DarthNebo 4y ago

Anyone remember Refresh concept from a while back, https://phase.com/magazine/refresh-rethinking-the-browser/ https://phase.com/magazine/refresh-rethinking-the-browser/

chrisfrantz 4y ago
This looks great, did it ever launch?
- workona 4y ago
  Our iPad app provides a pretty similar user experience as their concept video: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workona-project-organizer/id1514249129 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workona-project-organizer/id15...

Shadonototra 4y ago

dead on arrival, nobody is looking for a new browser chrome proved that people give no shit about browsers the UI/UX haven't changed since day 1, still minimalist AF firefox usage dropped massively, as they kept iterating on their UI/UX, forgetting the reason why people needed a browser in the fist place, instead they kept raising the salary of their CEO, as if he/she/it was the reason why people wanted to use firefox :') the focus is on the websites people literally only want an address bar and sync-able bookmarks/history with their phone, that's exactly what chrome/safari provide firefox can't even provide this, and they keep push their AD/sponsored articles about how sweet firefox is, nobody cares every other browsers from shady companies like this one are just cash grab (including firefox) the only logical evolution of browsers is literally ChromeOS, you boot to browse people's places (websites)

Nextgrid 4y ago
> people give no shit about browsers This is mainly because people who are tech-savvy already have a good set up (Firefox with uBlock Origin and all bullshit disabled), and those who aren't don't know what they're missing out on because a browser by itself (even Firefox) doesn't actually fix any of their problems. A user-focused browser bundled with functionality that fixes today's user-hostile web (whether built-in or as preinstalled uBlock/etc) would convince anyone who tries it.

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

ThinkBeat 4y ago

"Arc Browser" is just Chromium + uBlock + some GUI enhancements I really wish that articles about "new browsers" should state up front what (if anything) they are built on top of. Each time I am hopeful that someone has taken on the monumental task of creating a new, better, or at least different web engine/ browser. The competition would be good. The near impossible complexity in writing a new web browser from scratch seems indicative as to how broken the system has gotten.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I agree. Yet Another Chromium Clone is not all that interesting, regardless of how its UI is dressed up, because realistically the browser's most core qualities are not going to differ significantly from those of any other Chrome-based browser. Being forthcoming about the engine of choice will help people set reasonable expectations… it's not a revolution, it's Chrome with a new coat of paint.
zagrebian 4y ago
> Each time I am hopeful that someone has taken on the monumental task of creating a new, better, or at least different web engine/ browser. The competition would be good. What would be the benefit of having a browser with a new web engine?
- LegitShady 4y ago
  Competition and funding for non chromium initiatives. If someoone had asked the same question before chrome would you have agreed with them?
  - zagrebian 4y ago
    Well, Google didn’t develop a new engine for Chrome. They forked WebKit. And then Samsung, Microsoft, and others forked Chromium for their own browsers. (These forks are kept close to Chromium, but they’re still forks.)
- CharlesW 4y ago

zagrebian 4y ago

They need to come up with a different name. ARC Browser https://www.arcbrowser.com https://www.arcbrowser.com is already taken.

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joeman1000 4y ago

Tab-groups has fixed this clutter for me. I can: + hoard tabs in these groups (on safari), + close my browser session, + go and do something else with my life for a while, + come back (even on a different device) and open safari, select that saved tab group + the old ‘session’ is loaded and all my old tabs are back. There’s no longer any need to keep a 100-tab browser session open any more. Sometimes the syncing is horrible with this feature across devices though. I find myself opening a new tab and the sync process immediately deleting it… more often than I’d like.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

I thought this was going to be about the Flow browser. I'm interested in Ekioh Flow as a faster browser engine. Unfortunately it seems to be shaping up to be not only closed-source, but only available to proprietary licensees rather than as a downloadable product to run on desktops.

time4tea 4y ago

Lmgtfy - oh no you can't! Unless you meant a ROM manager.

hexage1814 4y ago

I will tell you what: I like they are trying something new. I'm not sure if it is gonna work, but if we stop to think, the last invention on web browsing user interface was the tabs, and maybe tab grouping more recently, but like they were invented in the 90s, so it's nice to see some someone trying something new, some new approach.

pHollda 4y ago

Why aren't they doing this on mobile?

notananthem 4y ago

Closed source, pass

hexage1814 4y ago

For those interested, here is a preview: https://www.loom.com/share/e540f28366ff4703a7c882291875166f https://www.loom.com/share/e540f28366ff4703a7c882291875166f