It’s chromium, it does that ambient color changing shit I hate, it “anticipates my needs” instead of just waiting my my instruction. This is a browser designed to make me angry.
I tried it for a bit, even daily drove it on my laptop for a while. It has a pretty slick interface, and uses containers so you could, for example, have one container that you are logged into your google account for (say, Youtube), and the rest of your containers you can not log into Google.
The downside is that 1) It’s still not mature as of a month ago. They are making massive changes and adding new features constantly, and 2) It’s still Chromium, so all of the downsides of that are still present.
If they switch to using Firefox or another open-source foundation, I’d be all over it.
Firefox already has containers. I still have yet to see a browser that beats stock Firefox in functionality, customization and privacy
I’d venture out there and say Vivaldi in functionality and customisation.
Privacy probably not, though Vivaldi does quite well.
Sadly it’s a Chromium browser.
Edit: a simple comparison.
This is the key. There are a few projects that can beat it in one way or another, but not all 3. Every project that beats FF in a functional way ends up sacrificing privacy. And those that somehow beat it in privacy are underdeveloped and run into weird compatibility issues or are missing support for key plugins.
It’s not like Firefox doesn’t collect user data at all. Vivaldi is hard to seriously fault in that area.
Unfortunately, Firefox lacks some features that make it a little clumsy at times. But for general use it is great. I keep it installed and use it almost every day because I believe in the browser engine and the need for diversity in that area. It’s just not for every need. At least not for me. That’s where Vivaldi and Edge have to help.
According to this Vivaldi protects you from tracking about the same as Chrome and Opera, and both of those provide less tracking protection than even Edge.
Chrome is run by a massive corporation with a reputation for for invasions of privacy. Opera is run by a nation state with a reputation for invasions of privacy.
Vivaldi is far better than either of those.
I’m talking about first and third party websites tracking you. I don’t use Chrome or Opera, but I’d rather only have to trust a browser of my choice, than having to place my trust in thousands of different websites.
The point is, if you care about tracking and privacy, you shouldn’t be using Vivaldi in the first place.
PrivacyTests makes it look like Brave is the only browser you should be using simply based on how good it is at blocking trackers by default. Brave is good, but it has it’s fair share of flaws from UI and terrible syncing to built in crypto and NFT stuff.
On mobile I’d suggest Fennec instead of stock Firefox since you can use add-ons without limitation, and don’t need workarounds such as the Firefox nightly.
It’s basically stock with enabled add-ons, and following the official release cycle with 2-3 days delay. Maintained by the original developers of the F-Droid store, so also a highly trustworthy source IMHO.
Thanks for the heads up. I run FF on all my mobile devices so it will be nice to have access to all the addons.
That’s what I’m using now. I think Arc does a better job of organizing containers and tabs, but it’s not worth the privacy/advertisement issues that come along with Chromium.
Sandboxing/containerizing stored session data like that is really nice. Firefox Multi-Account Containers is an extension maintained by Mozzila and was really the reason I stuck with Firefox even when it really kinda sucked there for a while.
The issue is that Firefox is, as far as I know, much much more difficult to simply use as just the “rendering engine” for some other customized browser.
There’s the arcfox experiment thing that tries to make firefox look and feel the same as arc, but if arc isn’t mature, then this thing is just simply unusable to almost everyone. It’s still probably easier to do than to make a completely new browser using firefox as a base though.
Eh, just another Chromium browser.
Isn’t arc a chromium fork thus subject to Google’s shenanigans?
Yes
And you’re forced to create an account to use it. At least it did a few months back
Yup, anti freedom, and also closed source so extremely privacy invasive as well.
No, it’s not a fork. A fork is when you take the Chromium browser and change it.
This uses the same rendering engine as Chromium - but the browser itself was built from scratch, uses a completely different architecture, and on other operating systems it doesn’t use Chromium at all.
As for “forced to create an account” Arc is temporarily free. Longer term you’ll have to pay a subscription to use it. So it makes sense that you need to sign up.
From the article:
“The company is also thinking about how to integrate AI into the browser.”
LOL - how absurd. I can’t even tell if this is a real product or just a meme?
AI AI AI Generative AI
Have you heard about AI yet??
It seems like every app is trying to force integration of a version of ChatGPT. It would make way more sense if the OS just had their “assistant” use AI, and just let it recognize the app your using and help out if needed. No need for an AI integration with every app.
While you’re not wrong, the implementation there is very complicated. My solution, which works quite excellently, is if I want to use GPT, I go use GPT
I agree with you. I personally don’t want ChatGPT on my OS either. I just also don’t want it on all of my apps too.
I’m not surprised. Edge has it integrated already and it’s annoying.
I hate it already! ~Strawberry
“available for anyone to download”
. . .
“It’s still Mac and iOS only”
ಠ_ಠ
You can download the Mac binary on Linux or Windows
You can’t do anything with it but it’s technically correct… the best type of correct.
I just downloaded to confirm if it still requires signing up for an account to use it (I was on the wait list and ditched it immediately because of this). It still does. I’m ditching it immediately.
I may be a browser whore, always trying anything new, but fuck that. Make it optional for sync and such but lemme use it without signing into your service to see if I want to do so first.
If you feel the same, you aren’t missing much.
I would consider downloading it if only for testing since I work in SaaS, but a browser, Apple only, subscription based?
That’s an edge case I don’t need to consider.
“Unsupported Browser” is the only effort I need to put into it.
Haha, Edge case.
So that you will click on the article even though you are not using Mac and iOS.
Thought I’d throw my opinion into the ring here, since literally every comment is shitting on this.
Arc is a design project, that also happens to be a web browser. If you’re just calling this “another chromium fork”, I think you’re completely missing the point of who this product is for. First of all, it’s not for you.
Secondly, the design changes that arc is working on perfecting are pretty groundbreaking. The ability to customize the css and functionality of any web page without code and it saves your profiles for future use with a marketplace is super interesting to me. So much UI on modern websites is entirely unnecessary. As a designer, this is a dream.
Also, nobody is mentioning that their working on a Windows version THAT NATIVELY RUNS SWIFT ON WINDOWS. This is a big deal for future cross compatibility in general, why are so many people not looking at this?
Anyway that’s my rant. Trying to voice my opinions even if they’re the odd ones out to prevent a Lemmy based echo chamber. Feel free to disagree.
The whole problem is that the free internet is dying because google is starting to get a monopoly over it.
So, yes, “just another Chromium browser” is a very valid criticism, because it quite literally aids in jeopardizing the future of the internet.
I know a little about browsers, but not tons. Do all Chromium-based browsers use the same rendering engines? If so, isn’t it an issue as these Chromium browsers proliferate? If the engine deviates from the standards and they have the market share, feel like we just end up in the IE situation back then.
Well why didn’t you say we get cool trinkets and shiny doodads?! That’s totally worth handing control over the entire internet to a single corporation.
The ability to customize the css and functionality of any web page without code
Isn’t that something other browsers have been able to do for ages with add-ons like stylus, greasemonkey and others. it doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking.
People might be hesitant to download a different browser what they can accomplish with a simple addon.
what’s the big deal about swift?? the language has been cross-platform for quite some time now, it’s just there wasn’t much point for it on neither windows nor linux outside of “oh look i can write a hello world in swift”
good on them for utilizing it but I don’t think it’s revolutionary or anything
If this browser is as slow as their website, I can’t say it’s looking too good. It also appears to be just another Chromium browser, because I guess we needed more of those. And it appears to be closed source. Hard pass. ~Strawberry
Edit: No plans for a Linux port and they’re planning on shoehorning A"I" into it. I hate it already.
It uses whatever rending engine works best on the platform you’re using - Chromium’s main advantage is the extensive plugin library so that’s the one they use on most platforms, though they have said they have internal builds that run on other rending engines and those work fine (except for plugins). If there’s every any reason to drop Chromium they will.
As for being “just another” anything - it really isn’t. The way tabs work is fundamentally different to any other browser. At a glance, it just looks like a basic browser with tabs in the sidebar instead of across the top but it’s so much more than that.
For example most browser have three types of tab - Regular, Pinned, and Incognito. Arc has “Today” tabs, Pinned Tabs, Favourite Tabs (these are closer to “Pinned” tabs in other browsers), “Little” tabs, Split tabs, Popup Tabs, and Incognito tabs.
Notice there is no “regular” on that list - none of the tabs in Arc behave like a regular browser tab. Arc also doesn’t have bookmarks - tabs replace bookmarks. Here’s the breakdown:
- Today tabs go away at the end of the day (you can change this to be longer, I don’t recommend doing that). They go into an Archive and can easily be recovered.
- Pinned tabs aren’t like pinned tabs are synced between all your devices/browser windows and they stick around until you get rid of them. The process to create and remove a pinned tab is really simple and they are organised in groups and folders. Pinned tabs won’t necessarily bne running in RAM, so in a way they’re almost like a bookmark.
- Favorite tabs appear as just an icon instead of a full tab, and they appear in all of your groups (within a profile). They are also pre-loaded — handy for web apps that take a while to load.
- A Little tab tab doesn’t have tabs - it harkens back to the old days when the web was a lot simpler. It’s useful for quickly looking something up and then closing it a few seconds later. Links from other apps open in this mode by default.
- Split tabs are a single tab that contains multiple webpages - e.g. you might have your zoom meeting and your notes as a single tab.
- Popup tabs are similar to “little” tabs, except instead of being in a separate window they are embedded in a tab. If you have, for example, your issue tracker as a pinned tab, and you load up a link to a different domain name, it will open in one of these. You can go back to your issue tracker by closing the popup tab instead of hitting the back button six times… but it will still be a single tab for both your issue tracker and the link that the issue tracker took you to.
- Incognito works the same as any other browser.
Yes - it is closed source… but it uses an unmodified open source rendering engine and for me that’s good enough.
Nice explanation. I haven’t used it enough to judge yet myself. So far I find myself frustrated with the merging of tabs and bookmarks. Perhaps I’ll get used to it but it makes no sense to me yet. I see no viable substitute for traditional browser bookmarks (at least not the way I use them). 95% of my bookmarks are pages I do not visit every week or even every month. Where are they supposed to go where they’re both accessible and out of the way? Folders don’t seem like a solution to me.
Edit: another day in and I get it now. I realize now that opening folders in the pinned tabs section is madness, but there is a viable alternative: hover over the folder, then scroll/search for the bookmark you want and click it. That “tab” will now appear under the folder under pins, but the folder otherwise remains closed. So my tabs list does not get cluttered with inactive bookmarked pages, only the ones I have specifically opened, and only until I close them.
This isn’t a huge departure from “traditional” bookmarks systems.
So far I find that Lemmy specifically is much better in Arc, because link to external sites open in popup tabs. All this time I’ve been spawning whole new tabs using keyboard/mouse combos like an animal. The future is now!
When you put it that way, it does actually sound interesting, though I’m still a bit skeptical of its lack of open sourcing. In addition, unmodified Chromium phones home to Google a lot IIRC. There’s a reason Ungoogled Chromium exists. If there’s a way to use Ungoogled Chromium with it or even Gecko, it’d be a bit more compelling for me. I’m not quite sure if I see Chromium’s extension library as a positive. I get that it’s larger than Firefox’s library, and I’m sure there are plenty of interesting ones that aren’t on Firefox but are on Chromium. However, a lot of those extensions are either pretty low quality or are straight-up malware (I’m more concerned with the latter, the former can just be disregarded). It seems like every couple of months or so, a new article comes out about a bunch of malware being found on the Chrome Web Store. Even accounting for Firefox’s smaller userbase, there are very few articles about such incidents happening on Mozilla’s extension repository. And I’ve noticed that Mozilla tends to respond more quickly to reports of malware than Google does. CWS has also had a problem with survey scam extensions that blatantly impersonated various companies in the past, though I’m not sure if that’s still a problem. I’ve recently found that FVD Speed Dial intercepts search queries that are supposed to go to Bing or Yahoo when you use the search bar added by their new tab page before redirecting you to Bing or Yahoo when it’s not supposed to do that. Essentially an MITM attack. This behavior has gotten them banned from Mozilla’s extension repository in the past, but despite the fact that they’re still doing it, Google has featured the extension on CWS. ~Strawberry
The company is also thinking about how to integrate AI into the browser.
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
anyone
Lol, it’s just on mac. No windows version or even plans for a Linux one. Not that I’d use another chromium fork.
Tbf, it says download, not use.
As a non-Mac user, I’m not even sure if “Mac-only” or “yet-another Chromium fork” makes it less interesting.
wow, YET ANOTHER CHROMIUM BROWSER.
Fucking lame.
Came here wondering this. What’s the point?
Why are we excited about closed source Chromium garbage?
ACAB
All Chromes Are Bastards
Chromium with a new UI - what an innovation.
Edit: no way - you need to sign up to use it.
Edit 2: I thought I might as well check it out but not only do you need to sign up, you need to download it for MacOS to finish the signup process.
what about privacy?
From what I gather, while they track feature usage, they claim they won’t track your sites. They still won’t help protect your privacy from other apps, companies, and pages.
