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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 c

by thiht 3y ago

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. Also their release notes are fun to read.

prmoustache 3y ago
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?
- zsims 3y ago
  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.
  - skulk 3y ago
    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 [1]: https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#tabs.tabs_are_windows https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#tabs.tabs_are...
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    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.
- _23sd 3y ago
  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.
  - square_usual 3y ago
    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.
- thiht 3y ago
  Because I disagree on that
  - jdgoesmarching 3y ago
    This made me laugh, it’s a perfect response to someone stating a preference as if it were a law of computing.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  Because it works better like this.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    On a desktop with a shitty UX. Using the lowest common denominator doesn't help.
bloopernova 3y ago
I disagree that Tree Style Tabs are awful. I use it every day and it's rock solid. Firefox forever, yo! Whitest guy ever tries to make an F gang sign with his fingers
- mikae1 3y ago
  Long time TST user here. Yeah, it's actually very stable, even after the it became a WebExtension. Last year I've used Sideberry extensively. It has some nifty features that TST does not have. Do these two extensions look native to their host OS? Nope. I can live with that if don't need to use another closed source Chrome clone.
  - botanical 3y ago
    Sideberry doesn't look native, but I use TST and it looks exactly like the Firefox tabbar
- thiht 3y ago
  To each their own I guess! 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.
- DavideNL 3y ago
  > I disagree that Tree Style Tabs are awful. 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.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    4k screen, but run at the standard hidpi on macOS. I also use it on an m1 MacBook pro screen. My standard setup is 3 screens: portrait, landscape, landscape. I run the browser on either of the landscape screens depending on what I'm working on.
rogerclark 3y ago
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.
- kajecounterhack 3y ago
  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.
  - fmajid 3y ago
    Vivaldi works on Linux (well, Ubuntu at least) and has top-notch tab management
  - jwells89 3y ago
    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.
nsonha 3y ago
> tab tiling 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?
subsection1h 3y ago
> Firefox also has vertical tabs via Sidebery and TreeStyleTab [...] but the look and feel honestly sucks I wrote a custom stylesheet for Tree Style Tab years ago. Did you do this, and if so, what did you find lacking afterwards?
- jwells89 3y ago
  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.

by thiht 3y ago

prmoustache 3y ago

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?

zsims 3y ago
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.
- skulk 3y ago
  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 [1]: https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#tabs.tabs_are_windows https://qutebrowser.org/doc/help/settings.html#tabs.tabs_are...
- prmoustache 3y ago
  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.
_23sd 3y ago
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.
- square_usual 3y ago
  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.
thiht 3y ago
Because I disagree on that
- jdgoesmarching 3y ago
  This made me laugh, it’s a perfect response to someone stating a preference as if it were a law of computing.
perryizgr8 3y ago
Because it works better like this.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  On a desktop with a shitty UX. Using the lowest common denominator doesn't help.

bloopernova 3y ago

I disagree that Tree Style Tabs are awful. I use it every day and it's rock solid. Firefox forever, yo! Whitest guy ever tries to make an F gang sign with his fingers

mikae1 3y ago
Long time TST user here. Yeah, it's actually very stable, even after the it became a WebExtension. Last year I've used Sideberry extensively. It has some nifty features that TST does not have. Do these two extensions look native to their host OS? Nope. I can live with that if don't need to use another closed source Chrome clone.
- botanical 3y ago
  Sideberry doesn't look native, but I use TST and it looks exactly like the Firefox tabbar
thiht 3y ago
To each their own I guess! 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.
DavideNL 3y ago
> I disagree that Tree Style Tabs are awful. 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.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  4k screen, but run at the standard hidpi on macOS. I also use it on an m1 MacBook pro screen. My standard setup is 3 screens: portrait, landscape, landscape. I run the browser on either of the landscape screens depending on what I'm working on.

rogerclark 3y ago

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.

kajecounterhack 3y ago
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.
- fmajid 3y ago
  Vivaldi works on Linux (well, Ubuntu at least) and has top-notch tab management
- jwells89 3y ago
  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.

nsonha 3y ago

> tab tiling 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?

subsection1h 3y ago

> Firefox also has vertical tabs via Sidebery and TreeStyleTab [...] but the look and feel honestly sucks I wrote a custom stylesheet for Tree Style Tab years ago. Did you do this, and if so, what did you find lacking afterwards?

jwells89 3y ago
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.