8 ms·

Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I will write one. I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of it

Not many straightforwardly positive comments here so far, so I will write one. I'm a Firefox user but I've recently been tempted by Arc primarily because of its 'workspaces' feature and its minimal UI that gets out the way. I used Arc for several weeks and really got a taste for these features, so I'm really happy to see them come to a Gecko-based browser. Thank you, and keep it up! My advice would be: don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security, when it's not clear exactly what's different from Firefox there. Instead, focus on this simple fact: it's an alternative UI for Firefox-based browsing, and that's great.

dao- 2y ago
Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this. I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable. For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient. Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
- Croftengea 2y ago
  Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?
  - dao- 2y ago
    We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.
    - Croftengea 2y ago
      Thank you!
- nokeya 2y ago
  Tab groups again? I don’t remember when exactly, but like 10 years ago Firefox already had this feature. I was using them happily, organising all my numerous tabs to a dozen of groups by theme (work, social, movies, etc). But then Mozilla decided: “Nobody is using tab groups, screw it!” and removed them. All groups and tabs were lost. Now history will repeat?
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong with bookmarks?
    - KingMob 2y ago
      Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark. (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?) But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.
      - torstenvl 2y ago
        I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete the whole folder or file it somewhere. I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
      - miah_ 2y ago
        I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices. Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.
        krferriter 2y ago
        This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at it later.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > I currently work on tab groups (It's happening.gif) But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    If you're unfamiliar with Sidebery, it's similar to TST but has a neat tab groups feature as well. Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to Firefox - such as vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re-working-on-in-firefox/td-p/57694 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
    - viraptor 2y ago
      Thanks, sideberry looks great. I've defaulted to TST for so long, I haven't looked for alternatives, but it seems worth trying.
- BodyCulture 2y ago
  Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since many years and still today.
  - mkesper 2y ago
    Are you using the snap version? I don't doubt that will give a crappy experience.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    happens to me too. but i would bet money it's because of memory corruption in both of our cases. i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks. so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.
  - BossingAround 2y ago
    I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my work laptop unless I have to)
  - codethief 2y ago
    Does it freeze completely (forcing you to resort to kill -9) or is it just slow? In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.
  - csouzaf 2y ago
    I'm not sure how this contributes to the thread. This isn't a technical support forum, so it might not be the best place to discuss specific browser issues. I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing. Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.
- methuselah_in 2y ago
  its good to see you giving direct feedback.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  Firefox defaults lately are awful and out of touch... gestures for reload/back/forward? really? several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really? a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years? using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either! i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead. so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
  - cma 2y ago
    > several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really? How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      but they will never say that out loud ;) so what is the official position? they don't even have one. nobody touch tickets mentioning these things. so sad how open source is so easily coopted. i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
  - slightwinder 2y ago
    > several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really? Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.
    - fabrice_d 2y ago
      Not just that, but why would Mozilla pick the winner here? Everyone complains about the side effects of default search engines, let's not do it again with ad-blockers! And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
- josh-sematic 2y ago
  Glad to hear Mozilla is working on adding this. I switched to a chrome-based browser for a while and the only thing I miss after going back to Firefox is tab groups.
- lloydatkinson 2y ago
  What is the hold up on adding Chrome like tab groups with colours and ability to collapse them?
  - dao- 2y ago
    We're working on that.
- NBPEL 2y ago
  Thanks for your replying, it's great to know that you're very open to see what Firefox forks are doing. And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions. I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.
espadrine 2y ago
Product presentation is a hard-to-develop skill. I agree that many aspects of the page are muddy. I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz To access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type Ctrl+L. For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type Ctrl+1, 2… or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through. I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.
adhamsalama 2y ago
Sideberry extension does this perfectly. I migrated from Vivaldi to Firefox because of it.
- prometheon1 2y ago
  Same! I switched back from Brave to Firefox last year after discovering that Sidebery has tab panels (which I think Arc calls workspaces) that can be set to use the same Firefox container. I want to be logged into different accounts of the same service, in Brave I had different "profiles" for this, but I like that now in Firefox I can have everything in a single window and I can easily switch between containers by switching to a different panel. (Which I have a hotkey for)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gchamonlive 2y ago
I might be willing to try it because of these workspaces. How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?
- artificialLimbs 2y ago
  With workspaces, I can choose a different workspace (on my Mac) with a right/left swipe of my mouse in the vertical tabs column. It's mind blowingly more productive.
charlie0 2y ago
Tried Arc and didn't like it. It's main selling point is the workspaces. However, I'm not the type of person to have 200 tabs open at once, so it wasn't as useful for me as I thought it would be. It's def a nice looking app though.
angryasian 2y ago
You should try Firefox Mozilla containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... This is official supported add-on
- mdaniel 2y ago
  Along with the excellent "open in container" extension, allowing launching URLs into containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c... $ firefox 'ext+container:name=HN&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid=41311435'
  - worble 2y ago
    I'm curious what the use-case of this extension is? Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler, and if it's just for my own browser then I'm going to be creating containers and then setting "always open site in this container" and Firefox will always open that site in a specific container. What are you using this for?
    - mdaniel 2y ago
      > Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler I have my own xdg-open in the PATH which supersedes the /usr/bin one (I believe there actually is a plugin mechanism for xdg-open but I found it easier to just create my own binary than learn their tomfoolery), and with that in mind, I'm able to make any URL routing decisions I'd like via that > then setting "always open site in this container" ... which won't work for multi-tenant sites like console.aws.amazon.com or portal.azure.com which use cookies or other such nonsense to determine who you are currently logged in as. That's actually true of Google and Microsoft, too, although I have less day-to-day experience with that. I am, of course, aware of the user switcher built into both AWS and Azure consoles, but it's not the same as having a giant red themed container for production accounts versus green for QA ones As for your specific question, I also use aws-vault to cook federated login URLs for the console because my experience of working with AWS SSO and Okta is some ... it's a lot of clicking ... versus letting aws-vault build the federated signin URL and then launching it into the container named according to its AccountID (so it's easy to programatically dispatch them)
autoexec 2y ago
If they commit to keeping all Firefox's spying out of their Firefox-based browsing UI that's all I really need. Firefox was fine, it's just stopped working for its users and respecting their privacy.
thisislife2 2y ago
> don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security And about privacy ...

dao- 2y ago

Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this. I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable. For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient. Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.

Croftengea 2y ago
Native vertical tabs in vanilla FF? Whoohoo! Imho, the killer feature is automatic group assignment based on URL patters. Will the vanilla implementation support it?
- dao- 2y ago
  We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.
  - Croftengea 2y ago
    Thank you!
nokeya 2y ago
Tab groups again? I don’t remember when exactly, but like 10 years ago Firefox already had this feature. I was using them happily, organising all my numerous tabs to a dozen of groups by theme (work, social, movies, etc). But then Mozilla decided: “Nobody is using tab groups, screw it!” and removed them. All groups and tabs were lost. Now history will repeat?
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong with bookmarks?
  - KingMob 2y ago
    Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark. (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?) But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.
    - torstenvl 2y ago
      I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete the whole folder or file it somewhere. I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.
    - miah_ 2y ago
      I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices. Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.
      - krferriter 2y ago
        This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at it later.
viraptor 2y ago
> I currently work on tab groups (It's happening.gif) But seriously, that makes me extremely happy. I'm using the weird hack in tree style tabs to do this and it's not great. I'd love this to work in general and something with a persistent "current context" for new tabs.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  If you're unfamiliar with Sidebery, it's similar to TST but has a neat tab groups feature as well. Speaking of, there are other cool new features coming to Firefox - such as vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re-working-on-in-firefox/td-p/57694 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Thanks, sideberry looks great. I've defaulted to TST for so long, I haven't looked for alternatives, but it seems worth trying.
BodyCulture 2y ago
Firefox is the only browser that freezes Ubuntu after some extensive internet use, especially with video watching. Since many years and still today.
- mkesper 2y ago
  Are you using the snap version? I don't doubt that will give a crappy experience.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  happens to me too. but i would bet money it's because of memory corruption in both of our cases. i have the exact same setup on ECC ram and zero crashes. on non ECC (cheap, garbage, that everyone accepted as the default) ram, one crash every couple weeks. so unless you can prove software on the same cpu is non deterministic, it is ram corruption.
- BossingAround 2y ago
  I've never used Ubuntu, but on Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed, I've never run into this issue (and I've had like 50+ tabs open for weeks since i don't really reboot my work laptop unless I have to)
- codethief 2y ago
  Does it freeze completely (forcing you to resort to kill -9) or is it just slow? In any case, I've been been a Ubuntu user since ~2010 (and a Firefox user since its inception). I remember there being a time when Firefox was slower than Chrome and freezing occasionally but that was a looong time ago and I haven't had any issues with performance or freezes/crashes ever since.
- csouzaf 2y ago
  I'm not sure how this contributes to the thread. This isn't a technical support forum, so it might not be the best place to discuss specific browser issues. I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu since 18.04 was first released (about 6 years ago), and while I've encountered some issues, I haven't experienced the problem you're describing. Of course, browser performance can be affected by many factors in your system. If you're seeking help, you might have better luck in a dedicated support forum or the official Firefox support channels.
methuselah_in 2y ago
its good to see you giving direct feedback.
1oooqooq 2y ago
Firefox defaults lately are awful and out of touch... gestures for reload/back/forward? really? several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really? a convoluted only-4-containers shenanigans that not even the author understand instead of simply isolating private tabs per window like everyone asked over the years? using on android? too bad now you don't have half the settings available, AND you will not access many extension for no technical reason other than mozilla implemented a blacklist! ...oh and no access to about:config either! i don't recall many examples because i gave up caring and have a list of settings (most not even available in the settings screen) and extension i must install on Firefox every new install which is larger than my OS customizations.... and on android i did what anybself respecting person would do and never touch Mozilla's default. install F-DROID's instead. so, no, Firefox defaults are not very good.
- cma 2y ago
  > several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really? How much less will Google pay to be the default search if this is added?
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    but they will never say that out loud ;) so what is the official position? they don't even have one. nobody touch tickets mentioning these things. so sad how open source is so easily coopted. i remember when google and Microsoft had to do the w3c misdirection, now they don't even pretend.
- slightwinder 2y ago
  > several decades and still not incorporating uBlockOrigin as a native feature? really? Might be better that way. AdBlockers are fast-moving, with a dedicated, diligent working community. Outside the browser, they probably can work better.
  - fabrice_d 2y ago
    Not just that, but why would Mozilla pick the winner here? Everyone complains about the side effects of default search engines, let's not do it again with ad-blockers! And anyway, their Google contract certainly prevents them from doing shipping ad-blocking by default.
josh-sematic 2y ago
Glad to hear Mozilla is working on adding this. I switched to a chrome-based browser for a while and the only thing I miss after going back to Firefox is tab groups.
lloydatkinson 2y ago
What is the hold up on adding Chrome like tab groups with colours and ability to collapse them?
- dao- 2y ago
  We're working on that.
NBPEL 2y ago
Thanks for your replying, it's great to know that you're very open to see what Firefox forks are doing. And I guess threads like this is a great place to gather user opinions. I think in this thread, people did talk about Split View a lot (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306665), can you talk to the team about this feature ? Considering it's getting a lot of comment, people seem to want it a lot.

espadrine 2y ago

Product presentation is a hard-to-develop skill. I agree that many aspects of the page are muddy. I personally find their compact mode the cleanest I have ever seen. This is the entire window: https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz https://imgur.com/hhfyeVz To access the address bar, move the mouse to the top, or type Ctrl+L. For the tabs, move the mouse to the left, or type Ctrl+1, 2… or Ctrl+Tab to cycle through. I wish Firefox had such a compact mode.

adhamsalama 2y ago

Sideberry extension does this perfectly. I migrated from Vivaldi to Firefox because of it.

prometheon1 2y ago
Same! I switched back from Brave to Firefox last year after discovering that Sidebery has tab panels (which I think Arc calls workspaces) that can be set to use the same Firefox container. I want to be logged into different accounts of the same service, in Brave I had different "profiles" for this, but I like that now in Firefox I can have everything in a single window and I can easily switch between containers by switching to a different panel. (Which I have a hotkey for)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gchamonlive 2y ago

I might be willing to try it because of these workspaces. How does It differ from Firefox Profile Manager?

artificialLimbs 2y ago
With workspaces, I can choose a different workspace (on my Mac) with a right/left swipe of my mouse in the vertical tabs column. It's mind blowingly more productive.

charlie0 2y ago

Tried Arc and didn't like it. It's main selling point is the workspaces. However, I'm not the type of person to have 200 tabs open at once, so it wasn't as useful for me as I thought it would be. It's def a nice looking app though.

angryasian 2y ago

You should try Firefox Mozilla containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... This is official supported add-on

mdaniel 2y ago
Along with the excellent "open in container" extension, allowing launching URLs into containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c... $ firefox 'ext+container:name=HN&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid=41311435'
- worble 2y ago
  I'm curious what the use-case of this extension is? Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler, and if it's just for my own browser then I'm going to be creating containers and then setting "always open site in this container" and Firefox will always open that site in a specific container. What are you using this for?
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    > Other sites/applications aren't going to be using this custom protocol handler I have my own xdg-open in the PATH which supersedes the /usr/bin one (I believe there actually is a plugin mechanism for xdg-open but I found it easier to just create my own binary than learn their tomfoolery), and with that in mind, I'm able to make any URL routing decisions I'd like via that > then setting "always open site in this container" ... which won't work for multi-tenant sites like console.aws.amazon.com or portal.azure.com which use cookies or other such nonsense to determine who you are currently logged in as. That's actually true of Google and Microsoft, too, although I have less day-to-day experience with that. I am, of course, aware of the user switcher built into both AWS and Azure consoles, but it's not the same as having a giant red themed container for production accounts versus green for QA ones As for your specific question, I also use aws-vault to cook federated login URLs for the console because my experience of working with AWS SSO and Okta is some ... it's a lot of clicking ... versus letting aws-vault build the federated signin URL and then launching it into the container named according to its AccountID (so it's easy to programatically dispatch them)

autoexec 2y ago

If they commit to keeping all Firefox's spying out of their Firefox-based browsing UI that's all I really need. Firefox was fine, it's just stopped working for its users and respecting their privacy.

thisislife2 2y ago

> don't advertise wooly claims about performance and security And about privacy ...