I have no affiliation with Arc, but I've been experimenting with it, and I'm quite pleased. I've known about it for a while but did not feel like trying it too early on before it worked out some kinks.
Have you tried Arc? Thoughts?
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Top comments (43)
It's been my go to browser for over a year now. All the pain points I've had with the UX in browsers has pretty much been solved by Arc.
Split views are amazing, so many great things about it. And even though I wasn't a fan of their initial iPhone app, they've revamped it and it's become my default mobile browser again.
So Chrome with a different UI, like all browsers except Firefox?
I will stay comfy where I am right now with Firefox.
But what I am really waiting for this this: The Flow browser, build from the ground up for multi-threading and performance ekioh.com/flow-browser/
Yeah, that is what it basically boils down to — which I think is kind of disappointing, but also kind of interesting in that it is primarily UI/UX focused in its counter-positioning and it's pretty good at this.
I find that their heavily-opinionated, we-know-better-than-the-user approach of not letting us keep our tabs beyond 30 days is a nonstarter. For a browser that's supposed to be focused on UX, it's surprising to see that such a stubborn decision still hasn't been changed. Every other feature is great, but that one is a dealbreaker, sadly.
Yes, I know that's what pinned tabs "are for"—I don't want to pin hundreds of tabs.
Is flow still being developed? Their website doesn’t have anything newer than 2021 on it. They even still refer to Twitter.
Is/was Flow open sourced?
There change-log unfortunately doesn't tell any dates.
support.ekioh.com/download/changel...
But it seems to be active. It's closed source see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(web_br...
Found something, hovering over the downloads from the page I can see a date:
So 2024-01-29 that's very recent 😀
I only find references to the version for Raspberry PI. And for the SDK's on all platforms.
I can't see a single indication there will ever be a version for another platform.
Yeah correct, but the Flow company also works internally on Low end devices, so it would be not profitable to make a browser for Windows/Unix.
Maybe Android or iOS, but lets see. But indeed it might already have died.
Different UI, but also no usage data is being sent to Google "underwater" by the browser. For example, if you use the speech api in Chrome, the speech is translated by the Google servers.
Killer Feature:
How is this different to any other browser in full screen mode?
How is using Perplexity as a search engine in Arc different to using it in any other browser?
Which keyboard shortcuts do you think are particularly useful?
By full screen I mean not using standard OS tools, but browser tools. I have a full screen window, without address bar and other distracting elements. At the same time, the menu slides out when the cursor is near the left side of the screen.
I probably won't have any arguments here, as I discovered “perplexity" only in Arc, I didn't know what a handy tool it is before.
I've just looked these up, and while I enjoy a good tiling window manager as much as the next person, I'm not sure why "splits" need to be part of the browser. That's what the WM should be handling. I guess if you can share a single link to multiple web pages with a friend that's a use case, but I can't imagine doing that more than once every few months.
I'm not sure exactly what "little arc" does, apart from pop open a small browser window. Given that most people have a browser open all the time anyway, which is at most an alt-tab away, I'm not sure what the point of this is either.
I can see copying a URL as markdown being useful if it does what it sounds like (i.e. it copies the site name and URL) which would save me one or two clicks, but it's not particularly convincing as a selling point to me :)
I'm not trying to be difficult, but because they've limited who can use it, I can't try it out for myself and only have people's comments to tell me what the features are like. Everything I've heard so far is either already available in other browsers or doesn't feel like it'd interest me. It's like when Hey came out and people talked about how innovative it was, but I wasn't allowed to try it so I couldn't make up my own mind, and it turned out to be nothing special. Or like how you see posts about oh-my-zsh every other day talking about its unique selling points even though most of them exist in native zsh or even bash!
For me the UI & UX was the starting point of my journey.
Hard to put word on it, but having only one window and one page (except for split) helped me organize myself a bit more.
The spaces (now available everywhere else I think) and profiles was a real plus to separate personal and work stuff (but still access them easily).
And the cherry on top is Air Traffic Control : Gives you the ability to define where to open a specific link.
Chromium being one of the most engine used in the web is actually reassuring for my work. But it's also the weakness of Arc, too much ressources are used.
Arc might not be the answer for you, but it was for me and I'm happy with it.
*EDIT : Forgot to mention about Boost (scripts I used on some specific websites).
And also the PIP without extensions. Works just fine with meet calls
Just waiting for them to send me an access. Seems pretty good, I've been following it for a long time
I was able to just sign up 🤷♂️
I think waitlist is for Windows users since it hasn't launched for Windows just yet.
Any product behind a waitlist is sus as far as I'm concerned, but once it's actually out I might give it a look.
Their website shows a lot of red flags to me:
Apple-centric talk
Phrases like this turn me off. They're implying that Apple software is better, which is irrelevant to the issue at hand,
Compatibility problems baked-in
They go on to quote,
followed by,
...and I look at it very cautiously. Arc is based on Chromium, so it's not a "Chrome replacement" in any real sense, and the fact that it doesn't work on Windows (yet) or Linux (at all) is disturbing, since Chromium does. They've taken Chromium and deliberately broken it. That's not removing the junk, that's adding stuff that you know doesn't work for the majority of your users. And that's a weird business choice.
Have we learned from Brave?
Brave was very equivalent to Firefox with a few privacy-centric addons and some weird crypto bolted on.
Arc smells like Chromium with some privacy-centric addons bolted-on, and I can easily imagine the crypto (or whatever future capitalist tech) landing in a year's time.
Happy to be proved wrong though!
No, don't think of it as a chromium wrapper. It's fundamentally different. Even though it uses chromium it changes the way you use your browser in a way that Brave/Opera/etc x10 don't.
I was skeptical but I'm completely sold now.
Never used it!
I thought you would explain about Arc, LOL!
Anyway, I found a cool blog that covers Chrome vs Arc.
Hah I actually wrote an entire 4,400 word blog post about my journey of switching from Chrome to Arc 😅 I was a diehard Chrome and ChromeOS user. Believe it or not, I actually switched from Windows and ChromeOS to MacOS just to use Arc a year back or so:
Why A Google Chrome User of 15 Years Finally Switched to Arc Browser
WOW!
Thanks for writing such a great post.
I have huge respect for authors and really loved some parts.
I may not switch to Arc since I'm on Windows, but still, getting to know something new is always worth it. Maybe I will make a detailed post on LinkedIn at some point later.
It's scary to think people have been using one brand of browser for 15 years. In my mind, the web hasn't even been around that long!
LOL! Anyway, both posts are different!
What I found was the comparison, and I was actually talking about that ^^
I have my invitation and access to Arc but no working on Windows 10. I'm sad.
Ah. Yeah it does have a sort of “this is for Mac first and foremost” vibe in its branding.
This really puts me off because my experience of software with that philosophy is that it generally looks pretty but has serious usability problems. People copy the surface look-and-feel from Apple without solving their UX issues.
The browser company, the company behind Arc is actually also the top contributor to Swift for Windows. They are going out of their way to do this specifically so it can natively be brought to windows with a native feel.
That's something I haven't seen any other company do. It tells me that their top priority is a solid native feel even if it came out on Mac a year earlier, their team ported an entire language and native UI library to a new OS just so Windows users could use the browser with the same native feel.
Yeah It saddens me that they think like that and not for any OS.
Yeah, it just has that Apple feeling to it
I've tried it. I'm not sure if it's my favorite browser, but it has its uses.
For me, though, here's what I use:
For personal stuff, I use Opera for all of its free built-in features and anonymity.
For seeing if a broken page is really broken, I always check Chrome (I keep my Chrome extension free and Chrome is really stable).
I use Firefox to see if my CSS will still work for people who use Firefox. 💀
I never use Vivaldi because it's too complicated.
I use Brave to amuse myself when I'm bored (scroll through the endless settings).
And of course, when I do something that “I didn't do”, I use TOR (Shh!).
Anyway, that's my list. A bit off-topic, perhaps, but I felt like sharing.
Arc is how browsers should have evolved by now. Arc didn’t bother to build yet another web engine and focused instead on features. Definite advantage.
So far I'm liking it. Not being an Apple user I can't comment on any Apple specific features (if any).
What I really like so far are the spaces. They are not like pinned tabs in other browsers in the sense that they operate completely from the cache. There was no network activity when reopening pages even after rebooting my laptop. This makes it really quick.
On the other hand, as long as I cannot use Arc also from my Android and Debian devices with synchronization like Firefox I will only continue to test.